How to use Vovious in Ableton Live

Vovious, the vocal tuner from DoublePi Technologies, is built around ARA: in a DAW that supports it, Vovious receives your vocal straight away and follows every change you make to the clip. Ableton Live does not host ARA plug-ins, so in Live you lose that part. Vovious also runs as a normal VST3 or AU insert and as a standalone app, which gives you the workarounds, and a companion tool can add the ARA part back. This guide walks through the options and what each one costs.

The short version

	Insert plug-in	Standalone app	Clip-based (null.audio EDIT)
Getting audio into Vovious	Only what Live plays through it	Export the clip, load the file	Instant
Hearing edits in the Live mix	Yes, through the plug-in	No, Vovious plays the file on its own	Yes, through the EDIT Bridge
Follows clip changes in Live	No	No	Opens the clip as it is in Live
What changes the clip	Render or freeze the track	Export and import the result	Commit writes a new file; Revert restores
Cost	Your Vovious licence	Your Vovious licence	Your Vovious licence + EDIT

Option 1: Vovious as an insert plug-in

Put Vovious on the vocal track as a normal VST3 or AU insert, first in the chain. Without ARA, a plug-in only gets the audio the host plays through it, so Vovious can't see the whole clip ahead of time or follow your edits in the Arrangement the way it does in an ARA host. To print the result, render or freeze the track.

What it costs: you lose what Vovious is built around: instant access to the whole vocal and staying in sync with the clip.

Option 2: the standalone app with exported audio

1. In Live, export or consolidate the vocal clip so you have its audio file.
2. Open the file in the Vovious standalone app and tune it.
3. Export the result and bring it back into Live, on the same position as the original.

What it costs: the round trip, every time you change the take. And while you tune, Vovious plays the vocal on its own: you don't hear it against the beat or through your vocal chain until it's back in Live.

Option 3: open the clip in Vovious from Live (null.audio EDIT)

null.audio EDIT runs the ARA host that Live doesn't have, next to Live, and connects it to your Arrangement clips. Vovious runs as the ARA plug-in it was built to be.

1. Put the null.audio EDIT Bridge first on the vocal track, ahead of your vocal chain.
2. Choose Vovious in the EDITOR menu on the EDIT panel.
3. Select the clip in Arrangement View and press EDIT. The clip opens in Vovious straight away.
4. Press play in Live. The Bridge plays your edit with the rest of the mix, in real time, and through every effect after it.
5. Press Commit. Only the edited audio goes back to Arrangement View as a new file; your vocal chain stays live on the track. Revert puts the original clip back.

What it costs: EDIT is a separate purchase, and you still need your own Vovious licence. It works in Arrangement View, on one clip at a time, with Ableton Live 12.3 or later on macOS or Windows. We test it with Vovious 1.0.16. The EDIT guide shows each step with screenshots.

Which one should you use?

• A single take you'll tune once: the standalone app works if you don't mind the round trip.
• Tuning you want to hear in the song, on vocals you keep changing: that's the case EDIT was built for.

Why Live works this way

ARA (Audio Random Access) lets the host hand a plug-in the audio and the timeline directly. Live does not implement it, and users have been asking for it on the Ableton forum for years. The background is in Does Ableton Live support ARA?, and there's a sourced list of which DAWs support ARA.