Live utilizes audio sample or MIDI sequences, referred to as Clips, which are arranged to be played live (i.e. Live's user interface is composed of two 'Views' – the Arrangement View and the Session View. Live made it easier for musicians to use computers as instruments in live performance without programming their own software, influencing the rise of global festival culture in the 2000s.

In 2010, Ableton introduced Max for Live, enabling connectivity between Max and Live. Live expanded to become a digital audio workstation (DAW) with a MIDI sequencer and support for virtual studio technology (VST). Live's timestretching algorithm, known as 'warping', was particularly notable and gave DJs greater control over mixing and beatmatching, smoothly blending tracks of different tempos. It offered sophisticated tools for triggering loops, playing samples and timestretching audio, and was immediately popular with electronic music producers. Unlike Pro Tools, which focuses on multitrack recording, the first version of Ableton Live was designed for performing with loops.

They released the first commercial version of Live on October 30, 2001. Roggendorf, another programmer, joined Behles and Henke in the late 90s and helped them turn their Max patches into a general set of software for retail. That gave us confidence to believe that a small company could actually survive on the market.' He said one of the first industry figures to recognise Live's potential was the Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, who was impressed by Live's ability to change the tempo of a loop without altering its pitch. Henke said later: 'I think the feeling we had was there was enough like-minded people in our closer community who could appreciate a product like this, and that it could work commercially. Though Live was not developed in Max, Max was used to prototype most of its features. Henke and Behles identified a need in Berlin's electronic music scene for user-friendly software for live performances, and worked with local acts to develop it. Behles and Henke met while studying programming at the Technical University of Berlin, and wrote software in the music programming language Max to perform techno as their band Monolake. Henke left Ableton in 2016 to concentrate on Monolake.

Ableton Live was created by Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf in the mid-1990s.

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