Live 12.4.25b1 Beta: Macros Stop Rounding Bass Parameters, and Push Gets Drift's Mod Source Back

Live's 12.4.25b1 beta landed October 29, and most of it is routine housekeeping. Two lines in the changelog are not routine if you build or use Max for Live bass devices, or if you sound-design with Drift on a Push unit. Both are small fixes to things that were quietly broken for a while, and both are worth knowing about before you spend another session fighting a macro knob or hunting through menus on hardware.

The macro that stopped at whole numbers

Here's the bug: if you mapped a Macro knob to a Max for Live float parameter running in Absolute modulation mode, Live was rounding that parameter to the nearest whole number every time the Macro moved it. The Macro's own display still showed a smooth, continuous value. The parameter underneath it did not move smoothly at all. It stepped.

For a parameter with a wide range, like a frequency slider going from 20 Hz to 2000 Hz, you might never notice a handful of missing decimal places. For a parameter living in a tight, musically sensitive range, the stepping was audible. Think fine detune amounts on a bass oscillator, a short envelope release measured in milliseconds, or a filter resonance control where the difference between 0.4 and 0.6 is the difference between clean and screaming. Macro-map one of those in a custom or third-party M4L bass device and turn the knob slowly, and you'd hear the output jump in little zips instead of sliding.

1. 4.25b1 fixes this. Absolute-mode float parameters on Max for Live devices now track the Macro's fractional value instead of snapping to the integer below it. If you've built your own bass devices in M4L, or you lean on community ones for sub synthesis, filter modulation, or envelope shaping, this is the kind of fix that changes how a mapped knob actually feels under your hand, not just what it looks like on screen.

It's worth saying plainly: this is a beta-only fix right now. It ships in 12.4.25b1, not in the 12.4.16 stable build. If you're not enrolled in Ableton's beta program through your account, you won't see it yet.

Drift's filter modulation comes back to the Push hardware

The Push 2.4.25b1 beta fixes a separate, more specific problem: Drift's Low-Pass Modulation Source was not showing up in Push's Filter bank.

Drift is the hybrid wavetable-and-analog-modeled synth built into Live 12, and it's become a default go-to for a lot of producers building sub and mid bass, partly because its filter section is simple enough to dial in fast under pressure. The Low-Pass filter has its own dedicated modulation source, separate from the general envelopes and LFOs, meant to be assigned and shaped without digging through Drift's full modulation matrix. On Push, that source was invisible. You could still reach it from the Live window on your computer screen, but the whole point of designing a bass patch on Push standalone, away from the laptop, was broken for that one control.

With the fix in, selecting Drift's Low-Pass Modulation Source from Push's Filter bank works the way it should. If you build bass patches on Push away from a screen, that's a meaningful chunk of your workflow back.

What shipped in stable, for anyone not running the beta

Live 12.4.16, released October 30, is a one-line stable update: a fix for Windows users who couldn't install or launch 12.4.15 because Windows Defender was flagging it incorrectly. Ableton's own note is direct about it: the file was never infected, Defender was wrong. If you're on Windows and 12.4.15 gave you trouble installing, 12.4.16 clears that up. Push's matching 2.4.16 build carries no changes of its own.

Neither the Macro fix nor the Drift fix is in stable yet. They're both sitting in the beta channel as of October 29, which means the usual caveat applies: betas get features and fixes first, but they also carry more risk of their own bugs, and Ableton doesn't guarantee a beta build is production-ready for a paid gig or a deadline session.

Worth turning on the beta for this one

If you spend real time in Max for Live devices with mapped macros, the fractional-value fix alone is worth opting into the beta program for, especially if you've noticed a bass parameter feeling "steppy" under a macro and chalked it up to the device itself rather than Live. And if Push is your main interface for sound design, getting Drift's Low-Pass Modulation Source back where it belongs is a small fix that removes a real detour from your workflow. Neither will show up in your release notes feed automatically unless you're watching for it, which is exactly why this kind of two-line beta fix is easy to miss.