This script attempts to convert an Ableton Live .als project file to a 1010music Blackbox readable .xml file. What it currently does is the following:

• Extract Simpler settings
• Extract Sampler settings
• Extract clip sequences from Simpler and Sampler tracks, along with clip sequences from Ableton Analog tracks and assign these as MIDI sequences on the Blackbox
• Extract audio clips as loop pads as loop pads on the Blackbox

For Simpler and Sampler the following settings are extracted and converted:

• Play start and end (loop is ignored)
• ADSR settings (the coefficients used here could use some tweaking)
• Multisample mappings As a note it won’t handle grouped Simplers/Samplers but expect it to be a standalone instrument.

For sequences the following things are extracted and converted:

• Each step
• Division is assumed to be 1/16, however if 1/32 or 1/64 note lengths are identified this will be used
• Sequence length
• Assigned to its corresponding Simpler/Sampler/MIDI track For Audio clip tracks the following things are extracted:
• Number of beats

For Simpler/Sampler/Audio tracks all necessary samples are copied to a specified project folder where the preset file is also saved. All sample references in the preset files are referring here, so by copying the whole folder to the Blackbox preset folder all samples will tag along. Samples need to be in .wav format though.

A significant limitation at the moment is that I’m working in Live 10 and I’m on Blackbox 2.1.5 so all of this was written based on this and function is not guaranteed for other versions. I’ve also only tested this on Mac (albeit two different ones). All code is written in Python and I’ve only used standard packages.

1. First, you need to have python 3 installed. I've used python 3.9.7 when writing the script. Apart from that I believe all packages used are standard python packages.
2. Download the script in the code folder called xml_read.py.
3. In terminal, cd your way to where the script is located and type python3 xml_read.py -h. This will show you the three arguments:
   • -i or --Input is your .als file
   • -o or --Output is what you want your Blackbox project to be called and located.
   • -m or --Manual is an option that will not copy any of the samples identified. This is convenient if you for example are converting a project made on another computer and the filepaths to all the files are incorrect. You will than have to manually copy all the sounds to you project root folder.
4. Run the script with the appropriate settings.
5. Copy the project folder to your Blackbox. Note that samples have to be .wav files.

• Nothing to show here atm but things will probably change.

• 2023-05-11 initiated version 0.2 on github

If you have any questions or feature requests, please contact me (pro424) on the 1010music forum or write in the thread. Be warned though that I have limited time and programming experience and do not take any responisbility for support.