Crate is a visual library for your entire Ableton catalog. See and play what's inside any project, find what it needs to open, and locate the one you're looking for in seconds — without launching Live.
Years of projects, scattered across drives, with names like final_2_actualfinal. You can't remember what any of them are, and opening one to find out is slow — when it opens at all.
Hundreds of projects and no way to hear them short of opening each one and waiting for plugins to load. The ideas are in there. You just can't reach them.
New machine, old project, and a wall of missing-plugin errors you can only screenshot. No list, no plan, no idea what to reinstall.
Live remembers ten projects, then overwrites them. You've learned to fear opening an old one, because it quietly erases where you were.
Internal drives, externals, a NAS, an old machine in the closet. No single place shows what you've actually been working on.
As you play your projects in Ableton, Crate captures the master output and lays it onto the song's timeline as a lossless waveform. Double-click any project to play its preview in the dock, and click the waveform to scrub. The more of a project you play, the more of its timeline fills in.
Crate reads every project to list the plugins, packs, and samples it depends on — and which are missing on this machine. Moving studios becomes a checklist, not a week of screenshots and dread.
Tempo, track count, plugins, samples — pulled from the project without opening it, all the way back to your oldest sets. Even decades-old projects show recovered detail, clearly marked.
Crate keeps a complete, timestamped history of everything you open — across every drive, with no ten-slot limit. See which projects you return to most, and resume where you left off, safely, every time.
Add your project folders or a whole drive. Crate scans everything, reads each project, and builds your library. It only ever reads your files — never changes them.
Add the included Crate Tap device to Ableton's master, once. It captures what you play so previews build themselves as you work. Runs cleanly on any interface, including ASIO.
Start your sessions in Crate. Browse, hear, and launch projects from one window. Every session becomes part of a library that only gets more useful.
With Crate running and Crate Tap on your master, every project you play is captured in the background as you go. No exporting, no extra steps — just keep making music and your library fills itself in.
No subscription. No renting your own catalog back to yourself. One purchase, every update in this version free, forever.
Crate manages your own work, on your own machine. You shouldn't have to pay rent to look at it. You buy it, you own it.
When a major new version arrives with real new capability, owners upgrade at a discount. Until then, every update is free.
No. Crate never modifies your .als files — it only reads them to build the library. It does write small companion files next to each project (the preview, and your tags, ratings and notes), so those travel with the project, but your actual project files are never touched.
Crate includes a small device, Crate Tap, that sits on Ableton's master. As you play a project, it captures the master output as a lossless preview placed on the song's timeline. Play more of a project and more of its timeline fills in. Double-click a project to play its preview in Crate — no exporting by hand.
Yes. Because capture happens inside Ableton rather than at the system level, it works with any interface and any driver, including ASIO — the setup most producers actually use.
All the way. Crate reads modern Live projects in full and recovers tempo, structure, plugins, and sample locations even from the oldest project files from Live's earliest days. Older projects show recovered detail, clearly marked.
For now, yes — and on purpose. Building deeply for one DAW means it actually works, rather than half-working for many. Other DAWs are on the roadmap.
No. Crate is an independent tool that works with Ableton Live. It is not made, endorsed by, or affiliated with Ableton AG.
Crate gives you a preview of everything you've made, so years of cryptic files finally make sense at a glance.
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