Ableton Live 11.1 beta available now with Apple M1 support | Engadget

Ableton Live 11 landed earlier this year, and the first major update to the DAW appears to be imminent. And it’s little surprise that the big news for Live 11.1 is the addition of support for Apple’s M1 chips. Being one of the the most popular music production suites, getting up and running natively on Apple silicon is pretty important for Ableton. The company notes that, if you’re already on the beta track, the autoupdater will not automatically download the M1 version — you’ll need to grab the installer from Centercode.

There are a few other small improvements to Live as well. The most obvious will be the new Shifter device which is a real-time pitch shifting effect. It’s monophonic, but has features like an LFO, glide, envelope and delay for further manipulating your sound. 

There are also two new Max for Live tools: Align Delay and MIDI Shaper. Align Delay compensates for lag while MIDI Shaper is for generating modulation.

Finally there are some minor tweaks to comping and clip handling as well. 

Ableton Live 11.1 is available now as a public beta. But I wouldn’t expect it to be too long before the update makes it way to a stable release.