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 Tamanpola,

knowledge, MacDemarko, and Daft Punk, among many others.

Toby Hahn is Ableton's engineering manager.

He joins the podcast to talk about software engineering for Ableton Live.

Kevin Ball, or K-Ball, 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.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn or visit his website, kball.l. LLC.

Toby, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to get to chat with you. So let's maybe start. Do you want to give just a brief introduction of yourself, a little bit of your career, and then maybe a little bit about Ableton and Ableton Live, which is what brought us here. Sure. So I've been working with Ableton for quite a long time.

I started here right after doing a PhD in math and wanted to get out of academia and

into a more practical kind of thing.

Started as an engineer on a team that was called the engine team back then and made my way through various teams.

At the moment, I'm the tech principal for live and also an engineering manager for part of the team.

Awesome. Well, and let's maybe do just a very quick, like, what is Ableton? What is Live?

What are these things? Then we can dive into the details. Sure. So what is Ableton? What is live? What are these things? Then we can dive into the details.

Sure. So what is Ableton? We make software and hardware for musicians, that is composers, producers,

live performers. And Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation with a focus on live performance, obviously,

but also works well in the studio or for producing, composing, all that.

A lot of people who use Live use it from their bedroom.

We call them bedroom producers.

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