Quantize without flattening. Stay in the pocket.
A Max for Live device that snaps your MIDI to the grid while preserving the natural swing, push, and pull of how you actually played. The grid, with your fingerprint on it.
The video does the heavy lifting on explaining what the device is and how the workflow feels in practice.
Quantize a played-in performance without flattening the feel of how you played it.
Standard quantization works by snapping every note to the nearest grid position. That's fast and useful when your timing was sloppy in the wrong way — but it also flattens out the small, deliberate timing nuances that make a performance feel human. The hi-hat that lays back ever so slightly behind the kick. The lead line that pushes forward through the chorus. The whole concept of being in the pocket.
The Pocket gives you the corrective benefits of quantization without that flattening side-effect. It preserves each note's relationship to its grid position — the direction and amount of the timing offset — while correcting drift, fixing double-hits, and pulling outlying mistakes into line. The result is clean, gridded MIDI that still feels like you played it.
Pick a grid, pick how much groove to preserve, hit quantize.
Choose your subdivision — 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32, with optional triplet and hybrid (straight + triplet) modes for material that doesn't sit cleanly in one or the other.
Eight levels of groove preservation, from none (full snap to grid, classic quantize) through max (most timing nuance retained). Pick the amount of feel you want kept.
Hit Quantize. The Pocket writes a corrected clip back into your track — with CC envelopes, sustain pedal data, and note lengths all preserved.
From "none" (classic snap-to-grid) through "max" (almost all timing nuance preserved). Pick the amount of human feel that fits the take — same control surface, eight settings.
Standard subdivisions plus hybrid modes like "1/16 + 1/16T" — for passages that are mostly straight but occasionally swing into triplets. Per-note grid decisions, automatic.
Sustain pedal, mod wheel, expression — all the continuous controllers your performance depends on come through unchanged. Quantize the notes, keep the gesture.
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.
Live's quantize is hard-snap: every note moves to the nearest grid position, regardless of how it relates to its neighbors. The Pocket preserves the relationships — the small, deliberate timing offsets that constitute groove — while still correcting the drift, double-hits, and outliers that classic quantize is good at fixing.
Preserved. The Pocket is CC-aware — it adjusts note positions without touching the continuous-controller data attached to your clip, so sustain pedal timing, expression curves, mod wheel gestures, and so on come through intact.
Yes — standard triplet grids (1/8T, 1/16T, etc.), plus hybrid modes like "1/16 + 1/16T" that handle mixed straight-and-triplet passages by deciding per-note which grid each note is closer to.
No — MIDI only. For audio quantization use Live's warping tools.
The Pocket writes the corrected clip non-destructively to a new clip slot, so your original is always intact. If you don't like the result, undo (Cmd-Z) and try a different groove or grid setting.
Yes. Once you've bought The Pocket, all future updates to the device are free for the lifetime of the product.
The Pocket 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.