From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics

Managing files - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics

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Managing files

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- [Narrator] File management is an important part of working with all audio and video applications. Let's take a look at some of the tools included in Ableton Live that help with file management. So I've got exercise 1 from chapter 13 open, and I want to draw your attention down here to this status bar at the bottom that's telling me that media files are missing. Now, this is a problem that occurs when you save a file without saving the audio and video assets that you're using into your actual project folder. And so if a project folder gets moved, or the folder that had those audio files in it gets moved, and the relationship between those folders is changed, when you reopen a project folder like this one or a project file like 13_01, You're going to be confronted with the message like this. It says: "the assets that are needed to actually use this project can't be found". And this includes not only audio loops that are out here on some clip slots, but it also can include things like the samples that are being used as part of this drum rack. If this happens to you, you'll want to double-click on this status message to open up this MIDI missing files dialogue over here on the right-hand side of Ableton Live. And then we can ask Ableton to go search for this content so we can ask it to search in the folder of our choice, we can actually ask it to search in the project folder, and you can ask it to search in the library if you want. Now I've got this narrowed a little bit to search in the exercise folder and I've done that because it's going to create a bit of a problem for us as we do this. And by the way, if you want it to direct it to search in a specific folder, you can have it do that. So I can click set folder and we can go into our exercise folder and choose that. By the way, I'll let you know that these files that we're looking for are sitting down here in this miscellaneous files folder. So I'll open this at the exercise files level, and then I'm going to click the search button, tell it to go. Now it's looked through all of this stuff and it's found one candidate for the bass loop, drum loop and kick one shot wave and it's really linked to those files, but it's found multiple options for the dirty roads file. So let me say okay here. And when this happens, go ahead and click on the question mark button and you'll notice that it shows us the two locations over here in hotswap mode. So I can just choose one of these and go ahead and double-click on it. And it now has found and linked all of these. We can tell that by clicking on the different ones, they're all a color, if I double-click on them and show them here, we can see that we see the waveforms down in clip view. If I go back to the drum rack and double-click there, I can see that the kick one shot sample is now back available in the simpler virtual instrument and we're ready to go. So one of the things that we can do now to kind of save this whole relinking thing is to go ahead and click the save button. And now it said that those are saved successfully and, if we reopen this, it will know where to look. Now, let me just say that these files are still saved outside of this particular project folder. So let me close that. We don't need that right now. And to finish this off, what I really need to do is go up to the file menu and use this option: collect all and save. Now, if I do that, it will ask me where I want to look. And so do I want to look for files from elsewhere? Yes I do. Because all this stuff is outside of this project. Do I want to look for files from other projects if they're there? Yes. Files from the user library would be mostly okay. The one thing that you have to strategize about is this factory packs. And the reason I bring this up is because if you've got a MIDI track in here, that's for a grand piano and you're using one of the sampler grand piano sounds, that particular preset uses, you know, maybe a gig worth of samples. And if you go ahead and you say yes, it's going to save every one of those one shot samples for every key on the keyboard into your project folder. And your project is going to go from, you know, maybe a couple hundred megabytes. If it's a large project, maybe a gig, well, it's going to end up doubling the size of that. So you want to take a look at what content is actually being used in your Live set before you do this. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say okay. You saw that processing screen flash very quickly. I'm going to go over here and click on current project and I'm going to show you that there's now a samples folder inside my Live set with an imported folder. And now we can see bass loop. Yep. And drum loop. Yep. And the kick one shot wave down here, and the dirty roads sample. This is all saved within this Live set. So now if I take this project folder, anywhere else, all of the assets that I'm using in the set are self-contained within the project folder. So there's nothing more annoying than missing files due to sloppy file management, especially when it's as something as important as one of your own project. Now that you understand file manage in Ableton Live, you can work knowing that your projects are organized and include all of the necessary audio files and samples needed to open and play your project.

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