Ableton Live

What works

Tested Suite version 10.1.18.

All menus and windows with a high degree of responsiveness

Built-in MIDI instruments

Windows VST (!) with jBridge

WAV importing and manipulation

Saving and loading audio clips and full projects to/from disk

Headphone playback and mic recording through PulseAudio; pactl aka PulseAudio Volume Control can be used to change the input/output devices

Was able to use 256-sample input and output buffers to minimize latency to 5.80ms according to the Preferences dialog

What does not

MP3s don't import properly; Ableton says "the file may be corrupt or not licensed".

Exporting as MP3 also appears to not function properly.

This was tested even with quicktime72 installed under winetricks.

Ableton Link: The Link button doesn't appear at the top-left corner. (This might have been removed in a recent version of Ableton; not sure.)

Workarounds

Used winetricks to install: vcrun2015 quicktime72 dxvk quartz

Used winecfg to set Windows version to >=7 to get the installer to run

Also have winbind installed via apt, although not sure if that's necessary

Some dialog boxes, e.g. Preferences, open behind the current window, so you need to resize the main window to see them

What was not tested

Anything related to physical MIDI hardware

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

I get

0354:fixme:dwmapi:DwmFlush () stub

spam in my Wine output, although the program seems to run fine graphically.

The installer will crash if there is not enough disk space available.

Audio / Video File Support

For Codec support install QuickTime with winetricks. Tested with .mp3 audio and .mp4 video files.
I get missing gstreamer 32bit lib errors when I don't do this. So I suppose gstreamer could be an native alternative.

$ winetricks quicktime72

Set your Windows version to Vista or 7 in winetricks to get rid of the black screen bug from QuickTime.

Black Screen on Startup

If you have the screen cleared black on startup when you use QuickTime for codecs, you have encountered Bug 1347.

Set Wine to Windows 7 mode in winecfg to f­ix this.

Bad Audio Quality

If you have bad audio quality, try a sample rate of 48000 in the audio settings.

If this does not help and you use pulseaudio (default on Ubuntu), kill it. Kill it with fire. (sudo killall pulseaudio).
Make sure the audio test in winecfg sounds good and is played back completely.

Exporting / Rendering Audio

Currently you need to build wine yourself and apply this patch, as stated in Bug 15695.
Roughly:

$ git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git && cd wine
$ patch -p1 < abletonexport.diff
$ ./configure && make -j3

Authorization File

Pass the path to the auz file as first parameter to Live.exe with an absolute Windows path. You only need to do this once.

$ wine Live.exe "C:\foo.auz"