Comparison with Ableton Live

In general, I think it’s healthy to look at Playtime as a completely new and different product, not a “remake” that is supposed to copy every little feature from the big ones. Live is undeniably an inspiration, but that’s about it.

With that said, let’s look into it. Keep in mind that the following information is partially subjective, coming from the author of Playtime ;)

What’s nice about Live

In general:

  • Live has been on the market much much much longer than Playtime. It’s way more mature and developed some nice attention to detail here and there.
  • Its GUI is more tightly integrated and streamlined with the rest of the DAW, which is a plus if you love Live’s workflow.
  • As there are many Live fanboys, especially in the EDM scene, there are many tutorials available that include the session view.
  • It has quite a number of features that are not available in Playtime.

Here are some features that Live has which I still plan to add to Playtime in the future:

There are other features that Live has which are not on my plan, at least not now. For example those that are not primarily related to the session view and therefore are beyond Playtime’s scope. However, if it turns out that something is not too difficult to add and if there’s enough demand … maybe I will consider adding at least basic support for it some day.

  • Groove quantization
  • Quantization of audio
  • …

In general, let me know if you miss something from Live very dearly! E.g. by opening a GitHub issue. Then let’s discuss there.

What’s nice about Playtime

In general:

  • It’s more versatile than Live’s session view, having fewer “artificial” limitations. As a result, it doesn’t force you as much into a specific workflow as Live. It shares REAPER’s philosopy in this respect.
  • It has a number of unique features not available in Live.
  • Its development is (or at least planned to be) more open and follows the same evolutionary development approaches used by REAPER and ReaLearn. There’s a direct wire to the developer. If a user has a feature request that fits into the main concept and it’s not too much effort too implement, it shouldn’t be unlikely for the FR to get implemented.
  • It has a more modern and responsive GUI.
  • And of course: It’s a REAPER plug-in and therefore inherits many of the general advantages that REAPER has over Live.

Some unique features which are not available in Live (to my knowledge):

  • Non-exclusive columns: Play multiple slots in one column at once
  • Non-scene-following columns: Make it possible for columns to opt-out of the scene launcher
  • Multi-slots: Put multiple clips into one slot (a feature that I plan to expand on in the future)
  • Smart record function: There’s a smart record button that allows one-click recordings (another feature that I plan to expand on in the future by adding different smart-record modes, e.g. to make Playtime 2 being more usable as a looper).
  • Tempo detection recording: You can let the first recorded clip dictate the new tempo (achieved by recording while in silence mode).
  • Multiple columns that play back on the same track
  • Native support for fixed-length recordings
  • Configurable downbeat & for MIDI recordings even downbeat detection
  • Let Playtime play itself: Since Playtime is a MIDI-controllable plug-in, you can let a Playtime MIDI clip control other clips in the same matrix.
  • Multiple matrices: You can fire up more than one Playtime instance + matrix in one project and do interesting things such as letting one clip of matrix A control clips of matrix B.
  • Matrix sequencer: Allows one to save and recall multiple session view recordings
  • More control over MIDI reset behavior
  • Full-screen session view
  • Clip activity visualization
  • Matrix import/export as textual data: You can export the settings/contents of a Playtime matrix in a textual format and import it again.
  • The textual format can be Lua (scripting language): You can generate Matrix settings/contents as Lua code and import it.
  • Controller integration is open and declarative: It’s done via ReaLearn, a more universal controller integration platform for REAPER.
  • Session View is a completely separate window (that’s a two-edged sowrd, I know ;))
  • Support for multi-channel clips
  • …

Under the hood, Playtime uses a quite modern technology stack:

  • Most importantly, its engine is built with Rust, a language that focuses on safety, speed and expressiveness. This allows for faster development iterations, good CPU utilization and makes hard crashs much less likely to occur (important in the audio world!).
  • The GUI is completely separate from the engine. It’s not necessary for Playtime to play and record clips, you can just close it. It’s even able to run as a separate process or on a separate device, such as an Android or iOS tablet (more on that soon). In the future, this fact can also be used to make Playtime more crash-proof.