Lose the human error, keep the humanity.
A Max for Live quantizer that tightens MIDI timing to the grid while protecting the natural push and pull of the original performance — and without making you nudge notes one at a time. The grid, with your fingerprint on it.
This is the real Pocket engine, running right here in your browser — no install, no purchase, no Ableton Live required.
Press Play, then turn the dials to find your sweet spot between the raw take and a hard snap — keeping as much of the original groove as you like. Click Drums to cycle the examples, or switch to Melody. First time? Hit Show me around to label every control.
You always hear the quantized result — drop AMOUNT to 0% for the raw take. Grid and feel are auto-detected per clip, just as in Ableton Live; COMMIT does nothing here, and OFFSET is inaudible on a single looping clip (there's no other part to play it against). The drum examples each lean a different way — a laid-back pocket, a jazz groove read per-drum, a soul groove heard as SWING, and a funk take blended through a Lazy GROOVE (tap the chip for other grooves).
Credits: acoustic drums and electric piano are CC0 (Versilian Community Sample Library); the hip-hop kit is synthesized in-house; the drum grooves are from the Groove MIDI Dataset (CC BY 4.0); the melody and the Lazy groove template are our own.
The interactive demo is built for a bigger screen. Open this page on a desktop to try The Pocket live, with audio.
Standard quantization works by snapping every note to the nearest grid position. That's fast and useful when your timing was sloppy in the wrong way — but it also flattens out the small, deliberate timing nuances that make a performance feel human. The hi-hat that lays back ever so slightly behind the kick. The lead line that pushes forward through the chorus. The whole concept of being in the pocket.
The Pocket gives you the corrective benefits of quantization without that flattening side-effect. It preserves each note's relationship to its grid position — the direction and amount of the timing offset — while correcting drift and pulling outlying notes into line. The result is clean, gridded MIDI that still feels like a real performance — whether it's a drum take, a bassline, a chord progression, or a melodic lead. And because it works on the whole phrase at once, you shape the feel across every bar with a few dials and hear it in context — instead of nudging notes one at a time and re-auditioning the passage after every move.
And it cuts the other way, too: swing, groove templates, and the offset dial let you actively shape the feel — add push or lay-back, or borrow a groove that wasn't in the original take. Use it as a clean, flexible quantizer and nothing more, or push it further and reshape the groove itself — your call.
Confirm the grid, dial in how much feel to keep, preview, and commit.
Focus a clip and The Pocket reads its feel and sets the grid for you — the subdivision, and whether it's straight, swung, or triplet — so a shuffled groove keeps its swing instead of straightening. Adjust anything you like from there: subdivision from 1/4 to 1/32, and the feel — straight, swing (a continuous 50–75% ratio), triplet, a straight+triplet hybrid for material that drifts between the two, or groove, which quantizes toward an Ableton Live groove template instead of a math grid.
Five dials shape the move: Amount (how hard notes pull to the grid), Leeway (a deadband that protects the feel in the take), Knee (how soft that edge is), Bias (correct primarily rushed notes, or primarily dragged ones), and Offset (push the whole pocket ahead of the beat or lay it back, in milliseconds).
Watch the result in a live piano roll as you tweak, and hear it previewed in real time as your track plays — bypass the device any time to A/B against the original. When it feels right, hit Commit to write it back to the clip — fully undoable in Ableton Live.
A live piano-roll preview shows exactly what you'll get as you turn the dials. Drag any note to pin it, lasso a phrase to fine-tune just those notes, and A/B against your original take by bypassing the device — nothing is written until you commit.
Straight subdivisions, a continuous swing ratio, triplet grids, and straight+triplet hybrids (per-note, automatic — for passages that drift between the two). Or quantize toward an Ableton Live groove template — your own pool or the Core Library — pulling the take into the template's pocket while the dials keep your feel. Focus a clip and The Pocket detects a sensible grid + swing for you, so a shuffled groove keeps its swing instead of flattening to straight.
Five dials — Amount, Leeway, Knee, Bias, and Offset — set how hard notes snap, how much of your feel to protect, how soft the transition is, whether to fix primarily rushed notes or primarily dragged ones, and how far ahead of or behind the beat the whole pocket sits.
Built as a Max for Live device. Drop it onto any MIDI track — no separate app, no exporting and re-importing files. The whole workflow lives inside Live.
Live's quantize is essentially just The Pocket's Amount knob on its own, with everything else fixed at zero — it moves every note the same percentage toward the grid, whether it was wildly out of time or already sitting in the pocket. The Pocket keeps that as a starting point and adds far more control over what gets corrected and what gets left alone. Four more dials shape the move — Leeway (a deadband that leaves in-pocket notes untouched), Knee (how gently correction eases in), Bias (correct mostly the rushed notes, or mostly the dragged ones), and Offset (slide the whole pocket ahead of or behind the beat). And it does plenty a plain grid snap can't: it reads each clip's grid, feel, and natural timing offset when you focus it and sets the controls to match; it keeps flams, drags, and rolls intact — snapping the main hit while the grace notes ride along, instead of crushing every note onto the grid; and it can quantize toward a swung grid or an Ableton Live groove template, not just a rigid straight one. The result: you fix real drift, double-hits, and outliers while protecting the deliberate timing that makes a part feel played rather than programmed.
They overlap, but The Pocket starts from your own take. The Groove Pool stamps a template's timing onto a clip wholesale. The Pocket tightens what you played while keeping the feel that's already there — and when you do want a template's feel, its GROOVE mode quantizes toward an Ableton Live groove template (your own pool or the Core Library) rather than stamping it flat: the same Amount, Leeway, Knee, and Bias dials pull your notes into the template's pocket as much or as little as you like, and the picker's VEL field can ride the template's accent contrast on top of your own dynamics. And when you simply want to add feel, swing is one continuous control — dial the exact amount instead of hunting through presets, tuned right alongside the other dials in the same live preview.
No — it works on any MIDI clip: melodies, chords, basslines, and keys as well as drums. Timing feel lives in every part, not just rhythm tracks, and the dials work the same on all of them. That said, the DRUMS view adds extras that make The Pocket especially powerful on a kit: per-lane parameter locks let you tighten the kick differently from the hats, and the swing and offset for each lane are auto-detected from your take, so the character of the original is preserved per voice — a straight backbone inside a swung groove stays straight. Thanks to deep Ableton Live integration, lanes are even labeled from the kit you're using when it's an Ableton Live Drum Rack. And drums get their own touches, like flam and roll detection.
You have fine control. Bias corrects primarily the rushed notes, or primarily the dragged ones. Drag an individual note to pin it exactly where you want it, or lasso a phrase — a chord, a fill — to apply different dial settings to just those notes. In drum view you can scope the dials to a single lane.
The Pocket moves note timing only — it leaves CC, pitch bend, and pedal data exactly where you played it. The pedal events don't move with the notes, so when a note shifts it can land on a slightly different part of the pedal than you played. Corrections are usually small enough that you won't hear any difference, but on heavily-pedalled passages with large moves it's worth a quick listen.
The preview is re-emitted by the device in real time, so how tight it sounds depends on your audio buffer. A small buffer (128 samples) sounds dead tight; a larger one (512) can sit a few milliseconds loose — slight enough you'd be hard-pressed to pick out by ear. If you track at a large buffer, we recommend dropping it down while you're shaping feel. Either way the result that ships is exact: when you Commit, The Pocket writes the notes back into the clip and Live plays them with its normal sample-accurate timing.
Yes — it both detects them and preserves them. Focus a clip and The Pocket reads the feel that's already in your take — the grid and the swing — and seeds them for you, so a shuffled groove stays shuffled instead of flattening to straight. From there you can adjust: Swing is a continuous 50–75% ratio (~67% lands on a triplet feel), or pick Triplet (1/8T, 1/16T, etc.) or a straight+triplet hybrid that decides per note which grid it's closer to. For a specific named feel, GROOVE mode quantizes toward an Ableton Live groove template — your own pool or the Core Library — instead of a math grid. Detection is most reliable on drums; on sparse or ambiguous melodic lines it stays conservative and leaves the swing for you to set.
No — MIDI only. For audio quantization use Live's warping tools.
Yes. Once you've bought The Pocket, updates are free for the lifetime of the product.
Start free with The Pocket Lite, or get the full version for the feel-shaping — swing, groove, and offset. Buy The Pocket once and use it forever; updates are free, and it ships as a signed, notarized installer with a license key, delivered the moment you check out.
Tighten your timing without killing your feel.
Intro price — $40 after July 31. Everything in Lite, plus the feel-shaping.
Already own another Rubato Audio plugin? Complete your bundle — you only pay the difference.
Secure checkout via Lemon Squeezy. 14-day refund. Made in Portland, Oregon.