als_read
Read-onlyIdempotent
Reads Ableton project and rack files from disk, extracting track, device, and automation data, with optional clip note parsing.
Instructions
Read a saved Ableton project (.als) or rack (.adg) from disk.
Returns:
Dictionary containing project metadata, track list, devices, and automation structure.
Note:
This is Channel B, a peer of the live connection rather than a fallback. It
answers two questions the LOM never will: what is in someone else's project, and
where an envelope's breakpoints actually sit.
Automation lives in two places and the LOM can read only one of them. Measured
over the 174-project corpus (docs/limits.md section 9): 52 (30 %) have clip
envelopes but 159 (91 %) have
track automation, and a tool that counted clip envelopes alone reported 110 of
those projects as unautomated. The two layers are reported separately here and
are never added together.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| path | Yes | Filesystem path to a saved .als project or .adg rack. The file is read from disk and is not opened in Live, so it does not have to be the set currently on screen. | |
| track | No | Narrow the read to one track, given either as its name or as its index in a string. Empty reads the whole project. | |
| locate | No | Answer with the arguments als_write needs to edit a field, instead of the project survey: the ElementTree expression, the attribute, the index that picks the right match, and the value currently there. 'tempo' for the project tempo, 'track_names' for every track's name. These are the fields usually edited on a file. Anything else needs an expression built by hand, which als_write's own confirm=False resolves against the file and reports on before it writes. | |
| report | No | True adds a formatted summary written for a person to read, alongside the structured answer rather than instead of it. | |
| with_notes | No | True parses the clip notes and reports note metrics, which is the expensive part of the read on a large project. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||