Editor Selector for Ableton Live

Working with multiple audio file editors from within Ableton usually means changing your Sample Editor setting each time you wish to work with a different tool (e.g. Melodyne, RX, etc.). Here is a method to allow you to select from a list of editors available on your system. These instructions apply to macOS only:

1. Open Script Editor, click “New Document”, and paste the following AppleScript code:

on open argv
	
	-- Ableton passes the file to edit as the first parameter
	set fileToEdit to POSIX path of (item 1 of argv)
	
	-- Each option must be the name of an application
	set defaultEditor to "iZotope RX 11 Audio Editor"
	set availableEditors to {defaultEditor, "Melodyne", "SpectraLayers 11", "SpectraLayers 12"}
	
	-- Display a selection modal to choose an editor
	set selectedEditor to choose from list availableEditors with prompt "Select editor:" default items {defaultEditor}
	
	-- "choose from list" returns false or a list, so we must index into it and retrieve the selected value after verifying that a selection was made
	if selectedEditor is not false then
		tell application (item 1 of selectedEditor)
			open fileToEdit
			activate
		end tell
	end if
	
end open

2. Change your defaultEditor and set of availableEditors to match the software available on your machine.

3. Save this script as an Application on your computer. I named it “EditorSelector” and save it to a directory called “Applications” in my home folder that I created to contain a number of small tools like this that I’ve written.

4. In your Ableton settings, select this newly created script application as your Sample Editor.

Now, when clicking “Edit” in clip view of an audio file or sample, a window will popup allowing you to select from a set of available editors.

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