Don't pick a tempo. Just start playing — we'll figure it out after.
A Max for Live device that detects the natural tempo curve of any MIDI performance and lets you decide, with a single slider, how much of that human variability to preserve and how much to straighten into a clean, fixed BPM.
The video does the heavy lifting on explaining what the device is and how the workflow feels in practice.
From a freely-played improvisation to a clean, gridded MIDI clip — start to finish.
Most MIDI tools assume you've decided on a tempo before you start playing. Set the project BPM, click in, follow the click. That works for some kinds of music. It doesn't work for the kind that arrives — the figure that needs to breathe, the take you start before you know what tempo you're in.
Just Play assumes nothing. Record freely. The device walks through your performance, traces the natural pulse beat by beat, and shows you a graph of how your tempo actually moves. Then a single Straighten knob lets you decide how much of that natural variability to keep — anywhere from untouched to fully locked at one fixed BPM.
The same three steps that live on the device itself — Analyze, Straighten, Apply.
Click Analyze tempo. Just Play walks through your MIDI clip and traces the natural tempo curve of the performance, beat by beat — and plots it as a visible graph.
Move the Straighten knob from 0 (preserve everything you played) to 100 (lock to a single fixed tempo) — and anywhere in between. The graph updates live so you can see what you're doing.
Hit Create clip to drop a corrected MIDI clip back into your project, or Set project tempo to leave the clip alone and just match the project's BPM to the detected tempo.
Just Play doesn't just give you an average BPM — it traces the moment-to-moment pulse of your performance and shows it to you as a graph.
The Straighten knob is the whole interaction: 0 means preserve the natural variability, 100 means lock to one BPM, every value in between is its own answer.
Create a corrected MIDI clip with the new timing baked in, or just set the project's tempo to the detected BPM and keep the clip as-is.
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.
No — Just Play operates on MIDI clips only. For audio tempo detection and warping, Live's built-in tools are the right place to start.
Offline. Just Play analyzes the recorded MIDI clip after the fact — there's no real-time tempo-following mode. The offline pass can look at the whole performance at once and make better decisions about the tempo curve than a real-time follower could.
Not the detection itself — Just Play treats its own analysis as the source of truth on the natural tempo of the performance. But once the corrected clip is back in your project, it behaves like any other MIDI clip in Live: you can warp, pitch, or change its playback speed using the standard Live tools.
Yes. The two outputs are independent. If you'd rather keep your original MIDI clip exactly as-is and just have Live's project tempo match what you actually played, click Set project tempo and skip Create clip entirely.
Yes. Once you've bought Just Play, all future updates to the device are free for the lifetime of the product.
Just Play is available now. One-time purchase, lifetime license, free updates. Ships as a .amxd file with a license key, delivered immediately after checkout.
Already own another Rubato Audio plugin? Email bundles@rubato.audio for bundle upgrade pricing — you only pay the delta.
Secure checkout via Lemon Squeezy. 14-day refund. Made in Portland, Oregon.