For quite some time, Live has had a special configuration file that lets you set additional preferences that aren’t accessible through Live’s interface. These preferences were originally created for internal use at Ableton as part of the development and testing process, and therefore aren’t thoroughly documented. Many of them probably won’t have a huge impact on your world, but there are a few that are quite nice to know about.
This special preference file is called “options.txt.” Don’t bother searching for it on your hard drive – you have to create it yourself. The file needs to be a plain text file (such as you create with Text Edit and the like) and placed in the Preferences folder for Live. On OS X, Live’s preferences are located here:
<home folder>/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live <version number>/
If you’re on Windows, a quick search for the file “Template.als” should find it for you.
You’ll probably see lots of folders for the different versions of Live you’ve installed on your computer, so make sure to put the options file in the current one.
If you want to get started right away, you can have a look at http://www.ableton.com/pages/faq/options_text. Otherwise, I’ll follow up shortly with a couple of the options that I think are interesting and how you might use them.
