Open-source alternatives to Ableton Live

Ableton Live is a workstation for producing and performing music: you record audio and MIDI, trigger clips to try ideas, arrange them on a timeline and shape the sound with its instruments and effects. The open-source workstations below do that production job on a Mac.

Ardour is built around recording, editing and mixing, and its Cue page adds clip launching for loop-based sketching alongside the regular timeline; it relies on third-party plug-ins for most instruments. Stargate is aimed at electronic music, with a pattern-based sequencer and a full set of built-in synthesizers, samplers and effects, and it deliberately does not load outside plug-ins.