Understanding Tapes
The core concept behind BeatButler.
A tape is a versioned Ableton Live project stored in the cloud. Think of it like passing a physical cassette tape to a friend — only one person can have the tape at a time. When you check out a tape, you're taking it off the shelf. When you check it back in, you're putting it back for someone else to grab.
Every tape has one of three statuses:
- Available — the tape is on the shelf, ready to grab
- Checked out by you — you have the tape and can make changes
- Checked out by someone else — someone else has the tape; wait for them to put it back, or sync down to listen to their latest changes
Each tape tracks its full version history, collaborators, activity log, and bounces. You can see all of this from the tape detail view.