Ableton Live, also known as simply Ableton, is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Ableton Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering. It is also used by DJs, as it offers a suite of controls for beatmatching, crossfading, and other different effects used by turntablists, and was one of the first music applications to automatically beatmatch songs. Live is available directly from Ableton in three editions: Intro (with limited key features), Standard, and Suite. Ableton also make a fourth version, Lite, with similar limitations to Intro. It is only available bundled with a range of music production hardware, including MIDI controllers and audio interfaces. History Ableton Live was created by Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf in the mid-1990s. Henke left Ableton in 2016 to concentrate on Monolake. 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 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. Though Live was not developed in Max, Max was used to prototype most of its features. Henke said later: "I think the feeling we had was [that] there was enough like-minded people in our closer community who could appreciate a product like this, and that it could work commercially. 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. 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. They released the first commercial version of Live on October 30, 2001. Unlike Pro Tools, which focuses on multitrack recording, the first version of Ableton Live was designed for performing with loops. It offered sophisticated tools for triggering loops, playing samples and timestretching audio, and was immediately popular with electronic music producers. Live's timestretching algorithm, known as "warping", was particularly notable