The Pocket docs.

Overview

The Pocket sits on a MIDI track as an effect. You focus a clip, dial in how much quantization you want, hear the result previewed non-destructively as the clip plays, and — when it sounds right — commit it back to the clip. Ableton's quantize gives you one knob: amount. The Pocket adds three more correction dials — Leeway, Knee, and Bias — for much more nuance in how and where correction is applied, and it goes further still: it detects each clip's grid, feel, and natural offset on load, preserves flams, drags, and rolls instead of crushing them onto the grid, and quantizes toward the swung or straight grid you actually played — all to keep the feel of the original recording. And when you want to go past the original, you can reshape the groove: dial the swing past what you played, push the whole pocket ahead of or behind the beat with Offset, or quantize toward an Ableton Live groove template instead of a straight grid.

Install

macOS: double-click the The Pocket.pkg installer and click through Continue → Install. It places the device in your Ableton Live User Library automatically — no manual folder-dragging.

Windows: double-click the The Pocket-Setup.exe installer. Windows SmartScreen is cautious about newly-signed software, so early adopters will likely see a warning on first launch — just click More info → Run anyway. It installs the device into your Ableton Live User Library automatically.

Open Ableton Live, go to Library → Max for Live, filter to MIDI Effect, and drag The Pocket onto a MIDI track. Click a clip on that track to focus it — its notes appear in The Pocket's piano roll. The header should read THE POCKET · Rubato Audio.

The workflow: focus → shape → commit

1. Focus a clip. Click a clip on the same track as The Pocket. Its notes appear in the roll, and The Pocket makes a best guess at the grid + feel (see Grid & feel below) — so a swung take often arrives already set.
2. Set the grid + feel. Use the GRID rotator to pick the smallest subdivision to snap to (1/16 is a good default for drums), and the FEEL rotator for the subdivision feel — STRAIGHT, SWING, TRIPLET, BOTH, or GROOVE. In SWING, a % field appears beside it; drag it to set the swing ratio (50% straight … 75% hard shuffle); in GROOVE, a chip appears beside it for picking a groove template (see Grid & feel).
3. Dial in the correction. Turn AMOUNT up to taste, then shape it with KNEE, LEEWAY, and BIAS (described below).
4. Hit play in Ableton Live. You'll hear the quantized result previewed in real time, not the raw clip (CC and pedal data still pass through). To A/B against the original, bypass the device with its on/off button. The clip on disk is never changed until you commit.
5. Tweak while listening — changes show up in the live preview within a few milliseconds.
6. Commit. When you're happy, hit COMMIT to write the quantized positions back to the clip in place.

The five dials

• AMOUNT (0–100%) — how much of each note's distance to the nearest grid line gets corrected. 0% is no quantization; 100% is a hard snap. The classic quantize-amount knob.
• LEEWAY (0–100%) — the width of a deadband around each grid line. Notes inside the deadband are left alone; notes outside get corrected. Use it to preserve deliberate off-grid playing while still fixing wild hits.
• KNEE (0–100%) — how gradually correction ramps in as a note crosses out of the leeway deadband. At 0 the transition is a hard step; wide open, it eases in smoothly. The knee-curve graph under the dials visualizes this.
• BIAS (–100% to +100%) — asymmetric correction. At 0, early and late hits are pulled equally. At +100, primarily rushed (early) hits get corrected; at –100, primarily dragged (late) hits do. Great for fixing one timing tendency without overcorrecting the other.
• OFFSET (readout in milliseconds) — shifts where the whole pocket sits relative to the grid. Dial it one way to push every hit a little ahead of the beat, the other to lay it back behind, or leave it centered to sit right on the grid. The shift is capped to a fraction of the grid cell, so notes never slide onto the neighbouring beat. (OFFSET is part of the full version; The Pocket Lite ships the four correction dials above.)

Grid & feel

Three header rotators define the grid your notes snap to and how their ends are handled:

• GRID — the base subdivision: 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32.
• FEEL — how that subdivision is spaced:
  • STRAIGHT — even subdivisions.
  • SWING — an uneven long-short ratio. A % field appears beside the rotator; drag it from 50% (straight) up to 75% (a hard 3:1 shuffle), with ~67% being the classic triplet-feel swing. Swing is applied at the GRID subdivision — so SWING + 1/8 swings the eighth-notes, SWING + 1/16 the sixteenths.
  • TRIPLET — snaps to a triplet grid.
  • BOTH — each note snaps to whichever of the straight or triplet grid line is closer (good for passages that drift between the two).
  • GROOVE — instead of a math grid, snap toward an Ableton Live groove template: every grid line moves to where the groove's pattern puts it. A chip beside the FEEL rotator opens a picker with this set's groove pool (save the project so The Pocket can read its .als) plus Ableton Live's Core Library grooves; the picker's VEL field rides the template's accent contrast on top of your own velocities. The AMOUNT / LEEWAY / KNEE / BIAS dials shape the pull toward the template's pocket exactly as they do toward a grid.
  Swing and triplet are two takes on the same uneven feel, so they're separate modes rather than combinable.
• END mode — what happens to each note's end when its start snaps: LEN keeps the original duration (the end moves with the start), GRID quantizes the end too, and POS leaves the end where it was (so notes stretch or shrink).

Auto-detect on load. When you focus a clip, The Pocket makes a best guess at the grid resolution and — when it's confident the performance swings — the swing feel and amount, and seeds the controls for you, so a swung take often arrives already set. It's a starting point, not a black box: straight or ambiguous material simply stays at STRAIGHT / 50%, and you can change anything. Whatever you set for a given clip sticks for the rest of the session, so flipping between clips won't lose your choices. (Detection is most reliable on drums; on sparse melodic material it stays conservative.)

Piano roll: navigate & select

The roll defaults to the first 4 bars (or the full clip if shorter). The cream playhead line tracks Ableton Live's transport.

• Wheel (or two-finger scroll) pans through time; shift-wheel zooms around the cursor.
• Click a note to select it. Shift-click (or Cmd/Ctrl-click) toggles it in the selection.
• Drag empty space to lasso a range — a chord in NOTES view, a run of hits across one or more lanes in DRUMS view. Shift-drag (or Cmd/Ctrl-drag) adds the lasso to the current selection rather than replacing it.
• With notes selected, the dials write to those notes only — global stays put. Selected notes get a thicker cream outline; notes with their own per-note dial locks shift to a peachier fill. Double-click a knob to release just that knob from the selection.
• Click empty space (or finish a drag that didn't touch any notes) to clear the selection.
• Drag a note horizontally to pin it to a specific grid line — useful when the dials land a hit on the wrong side of the grid. Dragged pins ignore the dials entirely. Right-click a dragged or overridden note (cream outline / peachier fill) to clear its customizations.

DRUMS view + per-lane overrides

If the track has a Drum Rack, The Pocket switches to DRUMS view automatically (you can override this with the view rotator). Each used pad gets its own labeled lane.

• Single-click a lane label to scope your dial edits to that whole lane (it highlights in orange). Drag a knob and only that lane's notes change. Click more labels to multi-select; click again to deselect.
• OFFSET and swing are detected per lane. Each voice carries its own push/lay-back and (in SWING feel) its own swing ratio, auto-detected from the take — so a backbone that plays straight inside a swung clip earns a straight feel of its own while the rest of the kit swings. Select a lane to set its OFFSET or swing by hand, just like the other per-lane edits. (Per-lane OFFSET and swing are part of the full version.)
• A knob readout turns coral when its value is overridden for the selected lanes, and lane labels with active overrides show in coral too.
• A ↺ RESET LANE(S) button appears when selected lanes have overrides — click it to clear them.
• Double-click a lane label to rename it inline (a per-track 4-character label).
• For finer control than a whole lane, lasso individual hits instead (see "Piano roll" above) — DRUMS and NOTES views share the same per-note selection model. Note and lane selection are mutually exclusive: selecting one clears the other.

Loop button

Click LOOP to enable Ableton Live's loop. For arrangement clips, the visible region of The Pocket's piano roll drives Ableton Live's transport loop — scroll or zoom to adjust the range without leaving the device. For session clips, LOOP just toggles the clip loop on or off; the loop bracket stays where you set it in Ableton Live.

Settings (⚙)

The gear icon opens a Settings overlay of machine-global preferences (they persist across projects), grouped the way the overlay shows them:

Quantize

• Auto-detect grid & feel on load — the master "adapt to the clip" switch: on each load, detect and adopt the clip's grid, feel, swing, and offset (on by default). Off = adopt nothing on load — your current settings stand and none of the clip's detected pocket is applied.
• Preserve per-lane feel — apply each drum voice's own detected push/lay-back and swing, so a laid-back snare or shuffled hat keeps its pocket (DRUMS; on by default). A sub-option of auto-detect, disabled when that's off; off = every lane follows the global feel, and resetting a lane returns it to the global value.
• Preserve flams & rolls — keep ornament clusters (flams, drags, rolls) intact instead of crushing every note onto the grid (on by default; see Good to know below).
• Follow Just Play tempo-maps — when you bring a Just Play CREATE WARPED CLIP (rubato kept) into The Pocket to shape its feel further, quantize against its preserved tempo curve instead of the project's straight grid, so The Pocket works with your rubato rather than flattening it (on by default). See Good to know below.

Drums

• Auto-switch to DRUMS view — flip to the per-lane view when the track has a Drum Rack.
• Guess drum names from General MIDI — label lanes from GM note numbers on tracks with no Drum Rack.

Display

• Show the time-scrollbar — adds a draggable minimap strip under the roll for panning time with a mouse, a wheel-free alternative to two-finger scroll. Off by default.

Good to know

• The Pocket plays nicely with Just Play's rubato. Just Play's CREATE WARPED CLIP already hands you a finished take that keeps your performance's push and pull — you don't need The Pocket for that. But if you also feel like shaping that take in The Pocket — tighten a few notes, add swing, nudge a drum voice — there's a catch worth knowing: a warped clip plays at one project tempo with the rubato baked into where the notes sit, so The Pocket's normal grid would fight it. This setting (on by default) handles that. Just Play writes a small tempo-map file when it warps the clip, and The Pocket quantizes against that curve instead of the rigid grid — so anything you do respects the rubato instead of ironing it out. It recognizes the clip by its notes — not by which track produced it — so drop the warped clip on The Pocket's track and it just works; the first time a recognized clip turns up you'll get a one-time prompt, and you can flip it under Settings → Follow Just Play tempo-maps or the in-device help (?). (Only the warped-clip path needs it — Just Play's CREATE TEMPO MAP bends Ableton Live's own grid to your take, so any quantizer already follows along.) Two limits: editing the clip's timing — moving, adding, or deleting notes — makes The Pocket stop recognizing it, and the tempo-map file stays on the machine that ran Just Play, so opening the project elsewhere falls back to the straight grid.
• Flams, drags, and rolls are preserved, not flattened. Ornaments — a flam's grace note, a drag, a roll — are clusters of hits intentionally played just off the grid. Instead of snapping each hit onto the nearest line (which collapses the ornament), The Pocket detects the cluster, snaps its main hit to the grid, and carries the grace notes / roll along with it, keeping the played sub-grid feel. Detected clusters show a coral halo in the roll; toggle the behavior under Settings → Preserve flams & rolls (on by default).
• The Pocket follows clips on its own track only — focusing a clip on a different track won't yank it away (a deliberate choice so multiple Pockets don't fight over the same clip).
• Notes recorded slightly before the clip's start marker are dropped, because Ableton Live's playback ignores them. If a rushed hit just before bar 1 is missing, it still lives in Ableton Live's clip data — drag it back into the clip range manually to recover it.
• CC and pedal data aren't repositioned. The Pocket moves note timing only — sustain pedal, pitch bend, and other CC events stay exactly where you played them. Corrections are usually small enough that this is invisible, but on heavily-pedalled material with large timing moves (more common in NOTES view), a pedal event can end up slightly out of step with the note it was holding.
• Preview tightness tracks your audio buffer. The Pocket re-emits the quantized notes in real time for the live preview, so how tight it sounds depends on your buffer size — a smaller buffer sounds dead tight, while a larger one can sit a touch loose. In our measurements that was roughly 1 ms of jitter at a 128-sample buffer and a few milliseconds (~5 ms) at 512; your machine may differ, but the direction holds. It's slight enough to be hard to pick out by ear, but if you track at a large buffer, drop it down while you're shaping feel. COMMIT is unaffected: it writes the notes straight into the clip and Ableton Live plays them with its normal sample-accurate timing, whatever the buffer. The looseness only ever lives in the preview, never in what you ship.
• Two-finger scrolling over the device can also scroll Ableton Live's device chain — but only if the chain is long enough to need scrolling. It's an unavoidable quirk of Ableton Live's UI; minimizing the other devices in the chain is the simplest fix.

Troubleshooting

• The piano roll is empty. The Pocket shows whichever clip is focused on its own track. If nothing shows, no clip on the track is focused yet — click a clip to focus it. The focused clip can live in either Session or Arrangement view, so if a track's MIDI is in clips you aren't currently looking at, switch to that view and click one.
• The device keeps getting replaced by Ableton Live's piano roll. Double-clicking a clip opens Ableton Live's note editor over the device. You don't need to double-click — a single click focuses the clip and leaves the device in view. If the editor does cover the device, press Shift-Tab to flip Ableton Live's Detail view back to the device; the clip stays focused the whole time.
• The preview doesn't seem to change what you hear. The effect can be subtle — groove lives in very small timing shifts, so the corrections often are too. Turn AMOUNT up and check that your other dials are at noticeable values. To A/B, bypass the device (its on/off button) to hear the raw clip, then re-enable it to hear the quantized result. If the clip is already tight to the grid, there may simply be little to correct.

Support

Questions or bugs? Email [email protected]. If it's a timing issue, mentioning the dial positions, the clip's grid, and whether LOOP was on helps narrow it down fast.