Tobias Hahn, Engineering Manager at Ableton, discusses the intricacies of developing Ableton Live, a leading music software used by artists like Daft Punk. He delves into the challenges of maintaining legacy code while innovating with modern technologies, emphasizing real-time audio processing. Hahn highlights the collaboration between engineering and UI design, illustrating how product owners and tech teams work together to enhance user experience. The conversation also touches on integrating machine learning and the importance of a supportive culture for onboarding new engineers.
Ableton Live stands out due to its combination of an intuitive UI and a powerful feature set, appealing to diverse musicians.
The engineering team's commitment to refactoring legacy code fosters quality assurance and promotes a collaborative culture within the development process.
Deep dives
Overview of Ableton Live and Its Users
Ableton is well-known for its flagship product, Ableton Live, which serves as a digital audio workstation tailored for both traditional music production and live performances. The software appeals to a diverse range of users, from amateur bedroom producers to renowned professional artists such as Daft Punk and Mac DeMarco. Its intuitive user interface design combined with powerful capabilities makes it a unique offering in the music software market. The platform allows users to create, perform, and produce music effectively, enhancing their overall musical experience.
Technical Challenges and Development Over 25 Years
The development of Ableton Live is characterized by a rich history that spans 25 years, with the software's underlying codebase continuously evolving since its inception. The legacy code is primarily written in C++ and supports multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and embedded Linux for hardware like Push. This long history introduces complexities, as many outdated coding practices and frameworks persist, compelling engineers to maintain a mix of modern and legacy systems. Real-time performance is crucial, especially in live settings, making the management of audio latency and UI rendering a significant focus for the engineering team.
Innovations in UI Design and Audio Processing
As technology advances, Ableton faced the challenge of adapting its user interface design to accommodate modern display resolutions while maintaining real-time performance. This prompted the engineering team to explore alternative rendering methods, such as transitioning to GPU-accelerated rendering, ensuring fluid visuals during high-demand audio processing tasks. The audio engine architecture is designed for efficiency, allowing various audio processing components to operate in parallel, which is essential for maintaining audio quality without latency. Integrating various control surfaces and third-party plugins further enriches user interaction with the platform, showcasing a collaborative approach to software and hardware integration.
Refactoring, Testing, and Team Dynamics
The evolution of Ableton's software development practices includes ongoing refactoring efforts to address legacy code challenges while maintaining feature development. Engineers now utilize a robust in-house continuous integration system to run unit tests and acceptance tests, fostering a culture of quality assurance and efficient onboarding for new developers. Team collaboration is emphasized through peer code reviews, ensuring that changes to the codebase are thoroughly vetted, which contributes to a supportive team culture. Ultimately, the collaborative environment and commitment to both technical excellence and user-centered design make working at Ableton an enriching experience.
Ableton is a music software and hardware company based in Germany. The company develops Ableton Live which is a digital audio workstation for both improvisation and traditional arrangements.
The software is remarkable for successfully blending good UI design with a powerful feature set. This has made it popular with new musicians as well as professionals such as Tame Impalla, Knxwledge, Mac DeMarco, and Daft Punk, among many others.
Tobi Hahn is Ableton’s Engineering Manager. He joins the podcast to talk about software engineering for Ableton Live.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.