I spent my day hacking on this to see what it’s capable of (built a simple little tool that displays MIDI clips as sheet music: https://github.com/madisonrickert/ableton-sheet-music-extens...)

My initial take on its strengths/weaknesses:

- Strong: Using the TS/JS ecosystem to render UI and tools

- Medium: Creating custom application windows in a web view. Window management features are pretty limited currently (can’t resize or render a native “close” button on the window chrome)

- Strong: Creating custom control panels for integrating with external services (like pushing and pulling audio clips or midi to/from an external service)

- Weak: Anything real-time, that’s still the domain of Max4Live or other control APIs, so don’t expect playback automation

- Medium: Tinkering with the Ableton project, clips, tracks, etc. API surface is still incomplete. Like I can read warp markers but not create them, for example. And I can’t access the global time signature settings.

The extensions are pretty aggressively sandboxed, and I appreciate that security consciousness in this season of the js ecosystem. It’s a hassle though if you want to save or load files outside of your little sandbox folder.