How it works
LabSesh is two things: a Max for Live device that measures real production time from inside Ableton Live, and a dashboard that turns showing up into something you can see. The short version of the whole product: it counts the minutes you actually produce, and it never inflates the number.
01It lives inside Live
LabSesh is a Max for Live device you drop into your default template once. It watches your session through the Live Object Model — the same API Live exposes to every device — so it sees what you actually do: the transport running, MIDI being written, parameters moving. It never looks at window focus or screen time, because neither of those is producing.
02A minute has to earn it
Time is counted in minutes, and a minute counts only when there was real work in it. Playback running, a note written, a knob touched — counted. The set open while you eat, scroll, or think with your hands off — not counted. A session is one sitting on one set; open a set and touch nothing and that session is a blip, kept visible but excluded from every stat. This is why the number is smaller than you expect, and why you can trust it.
03What you see
The dashboard turns those minutes into the week, your streak (30 active minutes makes the day count), time per project, and a per-session breakdown drawn minute by minute — when in a sitting the work actually happened, and how much of the open time was real. When the data is thin, the dashboard says less instead of guessing out loud.
04Your people, ambiently
The social layer is presence, not ranking: a lab light when a friend is in a session, and This Week — everyone’s active time side by side, a club feed rather than a scoreboard. Down weeks stay quiet. Nothing shames you; the work is the flex.
05Offline, and out of the way
The device adds ~0 ms of latency and processes no audio. Every session is written to a local ledger first, so it survives lost connections, quitting Live mid-save, even a force-quit — and uploads when a connection is back. There are no timers to start and nothing to remember.
06What leaves your machine
Session timing and activity counts — that’s it. No audio, no MIDI content, nothing about how your music sounds. Set names sync to your own dashboard and are visible only to you; friends see your time and your streak, never your titles. No data is sold.