Ableton Live Suite 10

[David44]

Has anyone deployed this software on to multiple machines?

 

It seems the Ableton Live Suite is very much aimed at a single user on a single machine. They have some documentation about installing it on a suite of computers but it involves manually opening the software and changing settings on each of the PCs that the software is installed on. We have around 50 machines to do this on, which is annoying and is going to waste a lot of time over the summer but I am actually more worried about doing it all again on a single PC that has been rebuilt in six months time than the 50 now.

 

How have other schools handled this? Did you manage to package the software in any sensible way to get it to deploy without having to open and configure it?

 

Thanks.

David.

[6Foot2]

What are the changes that need to be made manually? What is it about these changes that makes it necessary to do them locally and manually rather than remotely via batch file/CMD file/other?

[Cache]

We have it deployed and had to do the stupid activation and do it on each PC individually.

 

The only thing we did to try and ease it was to copy the file back and forth to the network as we did it, that way if we reinstall it we can atleast skip the activation part as the file will contain all the activations for the PC.

 

It does work, however we also disabled the autoupdate on the install and in the config files - the activation and config file depends on the version number and the folders being named the same as the installed version, so if the install updates and you end up with a different versioned install the activation file then gets messed up.

 

I'm not a fan, this was version 9 though maybe 10 has hopefully improved but it doesn't sound like it.

Edited August 12, 2019 by Cache

[David44]

The only thing we did to try and ease it was to copy the file back and forth to the network as we did it, that way if we reinstall it we can atleast skip the activation part as the file will contain all the activations for the PC.

That's interesting. I hadn't quite twigged that's what the instructions were describing. You seem to have written in one sentence what their official documentation couldn't convey in pages and pages of waffle. To be clear then, you activate the software on one machine, that puts something in the Unlock.cfg file, you copy that to a share somewhere, copy it to the next machine, activate the software again on that machine and then copy the file back to the network share and repeat 50 times?

I'm not a fan, this was version 9 though maybe 10 has hopefully improved but it doesn't sound like it.

 

I have some bad news for you.

[Cache]

To be clear then, you activate the software on one machine, that puts something in the Unlock.cfg file, you copy that to a share somewhere, copy it to the next machine, activate the software again on that machine and then copy the file back to the network share and repeat 50 times?

 

Yep, that's what we do. That way if you rebuild a machine and copy the Unlock.cfg file back it will already be activated to that device so it saves you a step in the future of having to log in to the account to activate it again.

 

What might save you a bit for time is we setup a programdata structure in the share and then just copied that folder to the local machine and merged it, then manually did the unlock.cfg file steps after that. Only a little bit of a time saving but I take anything I can get with this....

 

These are the exact steps I wrote down so I don't forget:

 

• Go to \\server\deploy$\Ableton Live Intro\
  
• Copy the ProgramData folder and paste onto the C Drive (Merging the changes)
  
• Install Ableton Live using the installer – alter the install location to: C:\Program Files\Ableton\Live 9 Intro\
  
• Untick the Launch Live before finishing the Installer
  
• Copy the Unlock.cfg file from the Master Unlock folder and paste it into C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live 9.7.2\Unlock
  
• Alter the permissions on c:\ProgramData\Ableton\SharedFolders so that Domain Users has Modify permission over it
  
• Launch Ableton and authorise it: Username: / Password:
  
• Copy the unlock file back from the computer to the server so that it holds all the activation records.
  
• Move the unlock file from C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live 9.7.2\Unlock to C:\ProgramData\Ableton\CommonConfiguration\Live 9.7.2\Unlock
  
• Copy the shortcut from the Start Menu to c:\users\public\desktop
  
• Test Ableton using your own user account to check it launches without error.
  

 

Obviously the username for the path where the unlock goes to will depend on your installing user.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Edit: You might want the attached options.txt file which goes into the preferences folder (C:\programdata\ableton\commonconfiguration\live 9.7.2\preferences) to disable the auto update and configure some shared paths (although despite what their instructions say, the % marks as variables don't work properly).

Options.txt

Edited August 13, 2019 by Cache