Hi Norbert,
Firstly, I’m really glad you’re enjoying Liberation, and it’s great to hear you already have Ableton synchronising to the timeline properly!
What you’re describing makes complete sense, but Liberation’s timeline is intentionally designed a little differently from a traditional DAW.
Rather than thinking of the timeline as “one track per laser”, it’s better to think of it as a flexible playback system for clips that can already contain multi-zone behaviour internally.
So instead of:
- Track 1 = Laser 1
- Track 2 = Laser 2
- etc
…the usual Liberation workflow is to build a clip that already knows how to behave across multiple zones/lasers. Then use things like chases, delays, oscillators, zone spread etc to control how the lasers appear and disappear over time.
This is actually what enables a lot of the more interesting effects in Liberation.
Another really important concept is clip groups.
You can assign an entire group of clips to a set of zones/lasers together, which makes it much easier to organise complex shows. For example, you might have:
- Group 1 → front truss lasers
- Group 2 → stage floor lasers
- Group 3 → audience beam lasers
Then it’s easy to assign every clip in that group to the relevant zone assignments.
This becomes incredibly useful if you later need to perform the same show with a different laser setup. Instead of rebuilding the entire timeline, you can simply change the zone assignments for the groups and the whole show updates automatically!
That flexibility is one of the reasons Liberation doesn’t lock the timeline into a strict “one track = one laser” structure.
If every laser had its own dedicated timeline track, things would actually become extremely difficult to manage once you start working with larger rigs. Even 5 lasers can become cluttered quickly, and on bigger shows you might have 16, 24 or more outputs.
Also, if you want lots of clips changing rapidly - for example in FLASH mode during a live performance - you don’t necessarily need to place every clip manually on the timeline. You can simply hit the record button and perform the clips live, and Liberation will record the playback into the timeline for you. That’s often a much faster and more musical workflow.
So yes, duplicating clips onto the timeline is absolutely valid when needed, but often there may be a more “Liberation-style” way to achieve what you want directly inside the clip itself.
The timeline is intentionally very simple and flexible - you can put clips anywhere, overlap them, layer them, offset them, and route them however you like.
If you explain the exact kind of effect or behaviour you’re trying to create, I’m pretty sure I can suggest a cleaner workflow than treating each laser like a separate DAW track 
All the best,
Seb
