StitchAble User Manual

Section 01

What StitchAble is

StitchAble takes the finished Ableton Live songs you already have and stitches them into one gapless, show-ready setlist — running order, per-song transpose, tempo and meter changes, guide, click, and return routing all reconciled for you. Open the result in Live and run your set.

It doesn't write songs and it doesn't play them. It's the step in between: the hour you'd otherwise spend rebuilding a tempo map by hand on a Saturday night.

The two-app pair

StitchAble is the stitching half of a pair that shares one engine and one sound library:

You don't strictly need MultiConvert 12 — StitchAble converts MultiTracks downloads on the fly at build time. But if you're building a library from scratch, MultiConvert 12 is the companion that makes the songs StitchAble stitches. A guide voice or click sound you set up in one app shows up in the other, because both read the same shared library.

Who it's for

Worship musicians, music directors, and playback operators running Ableton Live on stage. You should know Ableton basics — tracks, groups, returns, outputs — and nothing more technical than that.

Section 02

Install & activate

Three steps, once per Mac: install the app, activate your key, install the shared sound library. After that StitchAble runs offline.

Before you start

• macOS 14.6 (Sonoma) or newer — Apple Silicon or Intel.
• Ableton Live 11 or 12 to open the finished setlist. Suite is recommended; Standard works.
• A song library folder — one folder whose immediate sub-folders are your songs (Section 04).
• The MultiTracks Click and Guide Samples pack — free from MultiTracks.com. Download it before you install (Section 10).
• Optional: a multi-output audio interface, if you want click, guide, and returns on separate physical outputs (Section 12).

1 · Install

Open StitchAble-1.0.dmg, drag StitchAble into Applications, and launch it from there.

2 · Activate

On first launch, paste the license key from your purchase receipt. Activation is a one-time online check — after it succeeds, StitchAble never needs the internet again.

• You do this once per Mac.
• One license covers 5 activations — your studio Mac, your stage Mac, the spare.
• Out of seats, reinstalling, or moving to a new machine? Email support from the address on the activation screen and a seat gets freed. Details in Section 16.

3 · Install the sound library

Open Settings (the gear, bottom-right) and press Setup. StitchAble finds a downloaded Click and Guide Samples pack — it checks Downloads, Desktop, Documents, and Music — and installs the guide voices and click sounds into your Ableton User Library. The button turns green once it's in.

If you skip this, StitchAble still builds sets — every song just falls back to its own audio click and guide, and the MIDI click and guide sources in Section 10 have nothing to play. Run Setup.

Section 03

The main window

Two panes and one button do most of the work. Songs live on the left, the set you're building lives on the right, and Create Set turns the right-hand pane into an Ableton session.

The numbers on the screenshot below match the four headings on this page.

1Header

Three folder chips and a Scan button. Each chip shows the folder it's pointed at and has its own Browse button.

• SONGS — the folder your songs live in. Everything in the Library pane comes from here.
• OUTPUT — where finished sets get saved.
• TEMPLATE — optional. A Live project whose AbleSet folder is carried into project builds. The small ✕ clears it.
• Scan — re-reads the songs folder. Disabled until you've chosen one.

2Library

Every song in your folder, with a live count in the header ("78 songs", or "12 of 78" while a filter is on). Under the search field is the Compatibility box — tick Key or BPM to filter (Section 05). Each row's + adds that song to the set; you can also drag it across.

3Running order

Name the set at the top. Each row shows its position, the song, and the transpose stepper (− / value / +); the ✕ removes it. Transpose a song and its subtitle picks up the new key in gold — Fmaj → Gbmaj. Between rows, StitchAble tells you what happens at the seam: a + 1 bar gap, or a meter change → 6/8 when the next song's time signature differs (Section 06).

4Bottom bar

The status line sits just above it — what the last build did, and whether an AbleSet folder was carried over.

• Save draft / Load draft — store a running order, transposes and all, and rebuild it another day (Section 06).
• Ableton Live 12 — the version picker. Target Live 11 or Live 12 (Section 13).
• Project folder — build a self-contained … Project/ instead of a loose .als.
• Create Set — builds the merged session (Section 07).
• Gear — Click & Guide settings and output routing (Sections 10 and 12).

Version badges

Every song row — in the Library and in the running order — carries a colored badge before its name, plus pills for key, BPM, and time signature. The badge tells you what the source song actually is:

Section 04

Your song library

Direct StitchAble to one folder whose immediate sub-folders are songs. It reads the title, artist, key, BPM, and meter straight off the folder names — so a scan is instant, and your library is just a folder you already have.

How to name a song folder

StitchAble reads two conventions, and a library can mix them freely. Name your songs the authored way — it's the only one that carries the artist and the time signature, and it's what the app is built around. The MultiTracks form is there so a download works untouched.

Title and artist split on the first dash; key, BPM, and meter are the pipe segments. BPM parsing is forgiving (125bpm and 125 BPM both read), and a meter can be written 6/8 or 6:8.

A MultiTracks folder carries no meter, so StitchAble reads it from the .als at build time instead — which is why an MT song still shows a time signature in the running order even though its folder name never mentioned one.

Inside a song folder

A song folder usually holds a … Project/ with the .als in it, plus _MultiTracks/, Album.jpg, an AbleSet folder, and whatever else you keep. StitchAble finds the right .als on its own: it looks up to three levels deep, prefers the one inside a Project folder whose name matches the song, takes the newest if there's more than one, and ignores backup, AbleSet, and Ableton Project Info folders.

Added songs to the folder since you opened the app? Press Scan in the header.

Section 05

Finding songs

Search finds a song you already have in mind. The filters answer a harder question — what could I put here? — by showing you every song that fits the key or the tempo you're building around, and how far it would have to move to get there.

Search

The field at the top of the Library matches on title, artist, or key. Type bethel, alle, or Bmaj.

The Key filter

Tick Key in the Compatibility box, choose a target note, and set a tolerance in semitones. The Library reorganizes itself around that key:

• Songs already in your key list first, in full — nothing to do to them.
• ▼ LOWER and ▲ HIGHER sit side by side underneath: everything within your tolerance that sits below or above the target.
• The chip on the left is the song's distance from your target — not the transpose. With a target of C, a song in Bmaj reads −1 because B sits a semitone below C. A song in Dbmaj reads +1 because Db sits a semitone above it.

The BPM filter

Tick BPM, set a target and a ± window, and the Library shows only songs inside it. Both filters can run at once — key and tempo — which is how you find the one song that can follow the one you just placed.

While either filter is on, the Library header counts what survived it: 40 of 78.

Section 06

Building the running order

The right-hand pane is the set. Whatever it looks like here is what the finished Ableton session will look like — in order, in key, with the seams already worked out.

Putting songs in it

• Add — press + on a Library row, or drag the row across.
• Reorder — drag a row by its handle on the left.
• Remove — the ✕ at the end of the row.
• Name the set — the field at the top. This becomes the file name.

Transposing a song

Each row has a − / + stepper, good for ±12 semitones. As you move it, the row's subtitle shows where the song ends up — Fmaj → Gbmaj. The merged set shifts that song's audio and its MIDI to match.

What happens between songs

StitchAble tells you what it's doing at every seam, right in the running order:

• + 1 bar gap — a bar of breathing room, counted in the current meter. In 6/8 that's three beats, not four.
• meter change → 6/8 — shown instead of the gap note when the next song's time signature differs. The set changes meter at the boundary; you don't set anything up.

The amber audio note

A row may show a small amber audio guide, audio click, or audio guide + click tag. That means the song has no MIDI guide or click lane for StitchAble to pull — normal for a MultiTracks download — so it will use its own audio for that instead. It's information, not an error (Section 10).

Drafts

Save draft stores the running order, every transpose, and the set name. Load draft brings it back. Build the Sunday set on Thursday, reopen it Sunday morning, swap one song, rebuild.

Before you build

• Ableton Live 12 / Live 11 — which version the finished set targets (Section 13).
• Project folder — build a self-contained … Project/ folder rather than a loose .als. If you set a TEMPLATE, its AbleSet folder comes along.

Section 07

Create Set

One button. Everything the running order promised gets written into a single Ableton session, and Finder opens on the result.

What lands in the merge

Some of this is worth knowing, because it's what makes the result a set rather than four songs in a row:

• Header lanes union by name. Every song's SONG TITLE, CLICK, guide, section, and lyric lanes collapse into one lane each, running the length of the show — not one set of lanes per song.
• Tempo and meter run end to end, with an explicit tempo step at every boundary, so the click is right the moment a song starts.
• Each song gets a SONG TITLE marker and a SONG END locator, and its key label filled in — so you can see the shape of the set in the arrangement at a glance.
• Anything hanging past a song's end is trimmed, so a long tail doesn't bleed into the next song.

Build time scales with the number of songs and whether any of them need converting. A MultiTracks song takes longer than a native one, because it's being rebuilt as it goes in.

Section 08

The Returns review

Four songs, each built by someone else, each with its own idea of what a return is. The Returns review is where those become your returns — named once, routed once, for the whole set. It opens automatically at Create Set whenever the set has more than one return.

Reading it

• Left — each song's returns, under a collapsible header in that song's color. Under every return is a Route N tracks… link, which opens the focus board (Section 09).
• Right — the returns the finished set will have. Each one has its Ableton A / B / C letter, an editable name, an output, and a delete button.
• The wires run from a song's return to the final it feeds, colored by the destination — so one color traces every path into a given return.
• Click and Guide get their outputs at the top (Section 12), and the footer counts the whole plan: 4 song returns → 2 finals.

What it does before you touch it

The default plan is usually the right one:

• Returns match by name, ignoring case and spacing. Every song's TRACKS becomes one TRACKS. Every DRUMS becomes one DRUMS.
• Empty and MultiTracks returns collapse into the shared TRACKS return, rather than cluttering the set with returns nothing feeds.
• Outputs get assigned. A return already on a real hardware output keeps it. A return with nowhere real to go — one feeding Master, common in Live 11 songs — is given its own distinct output (1/2, then 3/4, then 5/6…) so returns never pile onto one.

Section 08 · continued

Changing the plan

Everything in the review is editable. Nothing is written until you press Build.

• Rename a final return — type the body of the name; the letter stays automatic.
• Re-route a final return to any output, including outputs no song used. The full list comes from your channel count (Section 12).
• Re-match — use a song return's menu to send it to a different final. You can merge returns that lived on different outputs in different songs; that's the whole point.
• Add Return for a new bus, or remove one that nothing is feeding.
• Defaults… throws away your edits and recomputes the clean by-name plan. It's the undo for this window.

It remembers

Your matching, renaming, and routing are saved per running order. Build the same songs again and the review comes back pre-filled with the plan you approved last time — so the second build of a set is a glance and a Build, not a re-do.

Defaults… ignores the saved plan, which is how you start over deliberately.

Finishing

Build writes the set. Cancel closes the review without building anything — your running order is untouched, and you can come back.

Section 09

Per-track routing

Under every song's return in the review is a Route N tracks… link. Click it and the view zooms into that song: the other songs fade back, the finals stay pinned, and you get every stem in the song, one row each.

How it reads

Left to right: the song's tracks → the return they ride → the final that return feeds. Indentation shows Ableton's group nesting, so an AG Group and its children read the way they do in Live.

• By default every track follows its own return — the solid fan in the middle. You don't have to touch anything here; the focus board is for the exceptions.
• Ride a different return — a track's menu can move it to any of the song's other returns.
• Skip to a final — send a track straight past the returns to any final, or make a New return… for it on the spot. A skipped track draws a dashed wire that arcs over the return pill, so it stays readable in the fan.
• Everything is colored by its destination, the same as the main review.

‹ All returns takes you back out to the full patchbay.

Section 10

Guide & Click

Open the gear, bottom-right. Everything in here persists between sets and is shared with MultiConvert 12 — set a voice or a click sound up in either app and it's there in the other.

Setup

Setup installs the shared guide and click pack into your Ableton User Library. It finds a downloaded Click and Guide Samples pack on its own — Downloads, Desktop, Documents, Music — copies it in, gives the guide cues their proper names, and builds a browsable drum rack. The button's check turns green once it's done. Run it once per Mac (Section 02).

Audio or MIDI — for click and guide, separately

Each has a green Audio | MIDI switch. This is the single most consequential choice in Settings, so it's worth being clear about what it does:

MIDI is the better answer when your songs have MIDI guide and click lanes, because you get one click sound and one guide voice across a set built from a dozen different sources. Not every song does — a MultiTracks download, for one, ships with audio and nothing else. StitchAble tells you which songs those are with the amber note in the running order, and quietly lets them play their own audio (Section 06).

The click

On MIDI, each click pad — Accent, Quarter, Eighth, Sixteenth — gets its own sound, chosen from your installed click library, and its own pitch (−24 to +24 semitones). So you can build a click that cuts through a loud stage without being ugly, once, and have it for every set after that.

Show click folder opens the installed clicks in Finder.

Section 10 · continued

The guide

Here's the thing to understand, because everything else follows from it: the cues are already in your songs. StitchAble doesn't write them, move them, or invent them. It merges the guide lanes your songs already have and decides what those notes sound like.

What you're actually choosing

• Family — the voice: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, or one of your own. A chosen family stays entirely inside itself; cues never leak in from another language.
• Cue Library… — browse and audition every cue in the family, including your own imports. Add Cue… brings in your own recordings — your voice, your wording.
• Order Cues… → Reorder drum rack… — which pad each cue sits on. This is the part that matters most: your songs send notes, and the pad order decides which cue each note fires. Get it right once and every set after that is right.
• Build Test Set — drops a set on your Desktop that fires every pad in turn, so you can hear the whole voice in ten seconds instead of guessing.

The same is true of the click

The click notes come from the songs; you choose the sound and the pitch of each pad. StitchAble is picking the voice, not writing the part.

Section 11

Transpose method

Transposing a song means shifting its audio. There are two honest ways to do that, and they fail in different directions — so StitchAble lets you pick. Settings → Transpose → "Use an AUPitch plugin on every stem."

Which one

Leave it off. At the tempo a song was built at, clip warp sounds better and costs nothing.

Turn it on when you want to run a song slower or faster than it was recorded. That's the one case clip warp can't be trusted with. Ableton has to warp the stems to follow the new tempo, and multitrack stems don't always take it — the warp can go wrong badly enough that a song comes out audibly longer or shorter than it should be. AUPitch sidesteps the warp engine entirely, so the song plays at the tempo you asked for and keeps its key.

Section 12

Output routing

Twelve songs from twelve sources have twelve ideas about signal flow. StitchAble imposes one, so that a merged set is predictable on any rig — yours, the church's, or the one you're walking into for the first time on a Friday.

The shape

• Stems go to their song's group.
• With one return, the group is the mix bus and sends to it.
• With two or more returns, the group becomes organizational — a folder, not a bus. Every stem is set Sends-Only and sends to its own return. Stems that used to run through the group are sent to the song's first return, so nothing gets orphaned.
• Each return goes to its own output, chosen in the Returns review (Section 08).
• Click and guide go straight out — their own outputs, no group, no return. Both the audio lanes and the unified MIDI CLICK / +GUIDE / +LOOPGUIDE lanes.

Channel count

Settings → Output routing → Outputs: pick 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 128 — the number of hardware output channels on your interface. That single number drives every output menu in the app: stems, click, guide, and every return. On a big interface, every bus can have its own pair.

Outputs read as Main, Ext. Out 3/4 for a stereo pair, or Ext. Out 3 for a single mono channel.

Section 13

Live 11 vs Live 12

Set the target with the Live version picker in the bottom bar, before you press Create Set. It's asking one question: which version of Ableton is going to open this file?

It's about the destination, not the sources

Your library can mix Live 11 songs, Live 12 songs, and unconverted MultiTracks downloads freely — StitchAble reconciles them either way. The picker isn't describing what went in. It's deciding what comes out.

• Live 12 — the default, and the right answer if you're running Live 12.
• Live 11 — StitchAble strips the Live-12-only data that Live 11 would refuse, and writes the file in the form Live 11 opens cleanly.

Either way, everything else — returns, routing, guide and click, colors, the send lists — is written correctly for the version you chose. A Live 11 set isn't a downgraded Live 12 set with its fingers crossed; it's written for Live 11.

Section 14

MultiTracks songs

You can drop an unconverted MultiTracks.com download straight into your library and put it in a set. StitchAble converts it as it builds — you never open it in Live first.

Unzip it, and leave it alone

A MultiTracks download arrives as a zip. Unzip it into your songs folder and change nothing. What you get is a folder named for the song, and inside it the Ableton set and a MultiTracks folder of stems:

That shape is what StitchAble looks for: a Live 8 set next to a MultiTracks folder. Find it, and the song gets the gold MT badge and is converted at build time. Everything else — including anything MultiConvert 12 has already built — merges directly, like any other song.

What conversion does to it

• Builds it as a clean Live project rather than upgrading the Live 8 file.
• Groups the stems, colored by instrument family, in the track order the download had.
• Routes the group to a single TRACKS return.
• Sends its click and guide audio to your click and guide outputs (Section 12).
• Reads the sections, tempo, and meter out of the Live 8 set, so the locators and the tempo map come across.

What it doesn't get

A MultiTracks download has a recorded click and a recorded guide and no MIDI, so it can't join the unified MIDI click and guide lanes — it plays its own audio, and the running order says so in amber (Section 10). If you want it in those lanes, convert it with MultiConvert 12 first; that's the app that builds the click, guide, and section cues a MultiTracks download never had.

Section 15

What the finished set contains

Everything you already built. StitchAble doesn't recreate your songs — it carries them across as they are and consolidates them into one session that's organized enough to run a show from.

What comes across

Your songs arrive intact. The stems, the groups, the section locators, the lyrics, the cues, the automation, the tempo maps — whatever was in the project is in the set. Nothing is flattened, rebuilt, or approximated, and your originals aren't touched.

What gets consolidated

The scattered parts become single, set-wide ones:

• One click lane and one guide lane for the whole show, instead of one pair per song — playing the sounds you chose.
• One set of returns, on the outputs you approved, instead of four songs' worth of near-duplicates.
• One tempo and meter timeline running end to end, with an explicit step at every boundary — so the click is right the moment a song starts.
• One SONG TITLE lane, one lyrics lane, one of each header lane, unioned by name.

What gets organized

• Each song sits in its own group, colored, and labeled with its key.
• SONG TITLE and SONG END markers per song, so you can navigate the set by name.
• Anything hanging past a song's end is trimmed, so no tail bleeds into the next song.
• Nothing left soloed. No missing media. Every track's sends consistent with the document's send list — which is what makes Live open the file without resetting your routing.

Section 16

Licensing

One purchase, five machines, no subscription. Activate once per Mac and StitchAble never asks again.

Activating

On first launch, paste the license key from your purchase receipt. That's a one-time online check — after it goes through, StitchAble works offline, permanently.

When you need a seat back

Reinstalling, replacing a machine, or out of activations? Email support — the address is on the activation screen — and a seat gets freed, or more get added. It's a person on the other end, not a form.

Refunded purchases can't be activated. That's the only thing that permanently stops a key from working.

Section 17

Troubleshooting

Most of what looks like a bug is StitchAble telling you something. Here's the translation.