Only the pads you played
Empty slots are skipped. You get a track for every pad that actually appears in your clips, nothing more.
Ableton Live 12 · Extension
Split a Drum Rack into tracks, in a couple of clicks.
Right-click the header of any MIDI track that holds a Drum Rack and Drum Rack Splitter fans it out into one self-contained track per pad. Non-destructive, your original track stays exactly as it was. Built for mixing, routing and drum sound design.
Beta Built on the beta Extensions SDK · Ableton Live beta required.
Drum Rack Splitter · 808 Core Kit
01 Use case
One rack, everything glued together.
A Drum Rack stacks your whole kit on one MIDI track. Great to play, awkward the moment you want to treat each drum on its own.
Splitting it by hand means duplicating the track for every pad and deleting the notes you don't want, one pad at a time. Drum Rack Splitter does it in a couple of clicks: one self-contained MIDI track per pad, each still playing through the Drum Rack.
From there it's a normal Live workflow: freeze and flatten the tracks you want to audio, then mix, route and sidechain each drum on its own. Your original track stays completely untouched.
Before
Drums
After
Kick
Snare
Hats
Toms
Ride
02 Features
Less busywork before the mix.
Native Ableton UI, fully localized
A dark, amber-accented dialog that looks like it shipped with Live, and it follows Live's own language across EN, DE, FR, ES, JA, ZH. Per pad: own track, a group, or ignore.
Category detection & one-click grouping
Kick, Snare, Tom, Hats, Clap, Ride, Perc and more are recognised automatically. Suggest groups buses them in one click.
Your own keyword dictionary
A simple JSONC file maps names to categories. Add your sample-naming habits and the suggestions get smarter.
Clean, lightweight splits
Keep only the Drum Rack to delete all other FX on the new tracks, so every split starts clean. Optionally lighten racks too, emptying every unused pad to free sample memory. On big kits that's extra work, so it runs a little slower.
Reversible in Live's Undo
Watch each track get built, then keep your original track or delete it, your call. The whole split sits in Live's Undo history, so you can step back anytime.
03 The workflow
Three steps. Non-destructive.
-
1
Right-click the track header
On any MIDI track that holds a Drum Rack, right-click its header, open Extensions and choose Split drum rack into tracks.
-
2
Configure
Send each pad to its own track or a group, ignore what you don't need, then hit Split.
-
3
Split
New tracks appear, each carrying the Drum Rack and only its own notes. The original is briefly muted while it runs, then left exactly as it was.
04 Demo
How it works.
Demo recording coming soon
Addassets/demo.mp4 to drop it in here.
05 Get it
Install Drum Rack Splitter
Before you install
Drum Rack Splitter is built on Ableton's Extensions SDK, which is still in
beta. It ships as a single .ablx file, not through the Ableton
store, and is aimed at advanced users comfortable running Ableton's
beta. The SDK is evolving, so expect rough edges and steps that may change.
Where it's heading The SDK can't route audio or bounce instruments yet, so for now each split stays MIDI plus the Drum Rack. As the SDK gains those abilities, Drum Rack Splitter will follow, per-pad audio routing and bouncing are the plan.
Requirements
- Ableton Live 12.4.5b3minimum; Extensions are beta-only for now
- The extension fileDrum Rack Splitter
.ablx - A Drum Rackon the MIDI track you want to split
- 1Download the latest
.ablxfrom the releases page. - 2Add the
.ablxin Live's Preferences, under Extensions: drag and drop it there, or select it. - 3Restart Live so the extension loads.
- 4Right-click the header of a MIDI track that holds a Drum Rack, open Extensions, and choose Split drum rack into tracks.