Live 12.4.15 Is Stable Now: More Plug-In Outputs, Three New Control Surfaces
Live 12.4.15 is out of beta
Ableton pushed Live 12.4.15 and Push 2.4.15 to stable on October 28, rolling up roughly two months of beta builds (12.4.15b1 through b7, dated September 2 through October 15) into one release. Most of what's inside already reached beta testers piece by piece, including the Auto Shift dry-signal latency fix for the Bass Pitch Range setting and the fix for Push 2 and 3 freezing when using Auto Shift, both of which we covered when they were beta-only. What's worth a second look here is what's actually new to this stable build, not just promoted out of beta. You can check which build you're on from Live's Help menu, or just open Preferences and look at the version string in the About tab; the update itself comes through Live's own updater or a fresh download from your Ableton account.
More outputs for plug-ins hosted in Max for Live
The line in the changelog that affects sound design directly reads: "Increased the number of audio output buses for plug-ins to a maximum of 32." This applies to third-party plug-ins hosted inside Max for Live devices specifically, not the multi-out instrument routing already available in Live's own mixer, which is unrelated and unchanged.
In practice this matters if you build or use M4L wrapper devices that host a multi-out synth or sampler and want to split its voices to separate chains before they ever reach an audio track. A layered bass patch wired with a sub oscillator on one output, a mid-range body layer on another, and a noise or grit layer on a third can now route all three straight into separate processing chains inside Live's session view, with no need to bounce to audio and reimport just to process the layers independently. Whether this changes anything for you comes down to whether you were already running into the previous ceiling. If you have never hit an output limit inside an M4L device, this part of the release doesn't change your day, but if you have, it's one less workaround to maintain.
Three control surface changes worth knowing
Live 12.4.15 adds native Control Surface support for the Novation Launchkey MK4 88, joining the rest of the MK4 line that was already supported. If you've been running one of these on generic MIDI mapping instead, check Preferences > Link, Tempo & MIDI to see if Live now lists it as a named Control Surface.
Move owners get a behavior change that's easy to miss in a changelog but noticeable at the desk: selecting an audio track no longer also selects its clip, unless that track has no devices on it. If you've been annoyed by a clip jumping into view every time you tapped a different track on Move, that's the fix.
And Akai MPK Mini IV owners get a small workflow win: MIDI tracks now arm automatically when you select them through the controller. It's a minor change on paper, but it removes a mouse click you used to need every time you switched tracks mid-session while tracking a bass line from a keyboard.
Push 3 Standalone gets a quiet fix
If you record external gear, such as a bass DI or a mic, straight into Push 3 while it's running in Standalone Mode, audio input channels 1 and 2 now unmute automatically when you switch into that mode. Before this update, you had to manually unmute them in Control Mode first, which is the kind of thing you only notice the first time you forget and wonder why your input is dead silent.
What to actually do with this
None of these are must-update-today fixes unless one of them solves a problem you already have. If you're running an MK4 Launchkey, a Move, an MPK Mini IV, or a Push 3 in Standalone Mode, the control surface behavior alone makes the update worth grabbing. If you build or use multi-out Max for Live devices for bass sound design and have been working around the old output ceiling, that's the one item here worth actually testing before you decide it matters. Everyone else can reasonably wait for the version that changes something they'll feel at the first boot.
Live still hasn't said anything about a Live 13, and nothing in this release hints at one either; 12.4.15 is a maintenance and small-features release, not a signal of a bigger one coming. If that changes, it'll be worth its own post rather than a line at the end of this one.