Searching and auditioning - Ableton Live Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that we're familiar with Live's browser, let's take a look at how to search the browser and audition devices and clips. So I've just got a default set open, if you're going to follow along on your system, and let's talk about how to do a search. So you'll notice at the top of the browser, there is this search field here. And you can also see that there is a quick key that will allow us to move our cursor into that search field. That would be Command + F on a Mac, or Control + F on a PC. So, I'm going to do that, and that jumps my cursor into that field. Now, if I had something selected out here, elsewhere in the interface, and I go Command + F, all of that takes me into that search field, so it's really useful. And I'm going to type kick 808. And let me start by mentioning that when you do a search like this, there's a new category that pops up, and it's the All Results category. So, that's showing us any content that's in our library that could come from any one of these other categories. Now, we can narrow this down by click-selecting one of these categories, because we know what we're looking for is located there. So for example if I go into Sounds, well, it doesn't look like there's anything there. But if I go into Drums, obviously, "kick 08," there should be something there, and it looks like there is one folder. Now I can use my mouse to navigate through this, or I can use my arrows on my computer keyboard. So, right arrow takes you further in to wherever you're going. So in this case, you'll see that the drums category is selected, and if I use the right arrow, it's going to take me in to the content pane, and select that one thing that's available there. Now if I press the right arrow again, it's going to open that up and show me, yeah, there's a sub-folder in there. So now, I'll use the down arrow to get there, and then the right arrow to open up that folder. And now we see that there is a bunch of stuff there. So if I arrow down, I can select one of the items that are in that sub-category, or sub-folder. And in this case, the preview switch is not enabled down here at the bottom of the browser. But if I want to hear that, I can hear it by pressing my right arrow key. (electronic kick) (electronic kick) And a lot of times I find it a little bit annoying to have the preview button enabled, and so whenever you click on anything, you're automatically hearing sound, so I actually like this. I can use my down arrow key to go deeper down in the list. And then again, my right arrow key to listen. (electronic kick) And then if I want to go backwards, instead of going with my right arrow, now it's with my left arrow. So if I go left arrow once, it's going to take me back up to my sub-folder. Left arrow again will close that. Left arrow again will take me up to the super-folder, or the folder that contained this, and then if I go left arrow, that will close that. And then one more time takes me back over into the sidebar of the browser. Now let's go into the All Results area and let's see what's there. Because here, we can have all kinds of stuff. And I've also pointed out that when I'm working in the browser, and in the content pane, I like to show a second column. Now, if yours is not showing that, remember that you can just right-click over here, and if I click Type again, it'll close the column. And let me do that again, and now I can choose that one. So I can choose any of these five to be the second column, but I typically will use the Type column. And that allows me to have a little bit of extra information between what I see in the Type column, and what I see as a file extension here, to help me understand what I'm actually looking at. And also, I accidentally clicked something that reversed my search. So in the Type column, if I click that again, it will have this in ascending order instead of descending order. So, I'm going to flip over to a slide here for a minute, because I want to show you what's some of the file extensions that you'll encounter in the browser. So, .alc is for a Live clip, which as you should know by now, is a bit of MIDI, or a bit of audio. .adv is for device presets. So, this is for like virtual instruments, or plugins, and presets of those plugins, and that would only be a single device, remembering that in Ableton, we can actually group devices together into a device group, or what we refer to as a rack, and that has the file extension of .adg. And again, that is two or more devices. .agr is for groove files. And again, a groove file is a file that we can use to quantize or rhythm error-correct both MIDI clips and audio clips. .alp is the file extension for Live packs, and we talked about that in the last video, and Live packs are content, or additional content, that you can download from the Ableton site to expand your library. .als is the actual file extension for Live sets. And then a .asd file is an analysis file, and these are files that Ableton uses to be able to calculate the tempo of an audio file. So when you look in a folder of audio files that have been used in Ableton live, you'll see the .wav or .aif file, and then you'll also see a second file of the same name with a .asd on the end of it, and that, again, is that analysis file that allows Ableton to be able to synchronize everything to play together. Let's go back over to Live, and let's talk a little bit about our search. So the search return here is going to have only things that have the entire search term in them. So I've got two words here, "kick," and "808," so this is going to show us anything that has both of those. And if we go deep enough in here, you're going to see that some have "kick 808," and others have "808 kick." Now, as we go down through this, we'll see that I've got WAV files. Let me expand this out so we can see a little more detail. We can see that I've got a rack preset. And this helps us to start to realize that the icon over here helps as well. So, audio files have this kind of an icon next to them, and device groups, or rack presets, have this kind of double rectangle showing. And let's see. For some reason, that's all we're seeing there in that. No clips. Yeah. I'm not sure why that's not showing any clips, because we probably should see some. Let me just type "808." Let's expand the search. So with "808," I do see some clips, and I see that there's a different icon there. And if I, let's go back into the All Results category, and let's do this by name instead. Yeah. So I can see that there are clips, we see rack presets. And as I go down, we can see here's a device preset, and so that has yet a different icon on the left-hand side, which is basically a single rectangle. And we see AIF files, and I'm not seeing any WAVs, but there's probably some in here somewhere. Now, if I want to load any of these things here, I can do that several ways. So with a rack preset, if I've got a track selected, I can just double click, and that will load that rack here that we see onto that track. I can also click and drop that on a track. Or, let me undo that, I can click and drag that on a track, but down here in the drop instrument or sample area. And last but not least, I can click and drag that same rack preset, and drop it over here in the "Drop files or devices" area, and it will automatically create a track and load that preset onto the track. If it's a clip, I can drag and drop that right there onto one of the clip slots here in session view. Or if I'm in the other view, I can do the same thing, I can drag and drop that right onto the track. Okay. So, finding and auditioning devices and content is a big part of working effectively in a program like Ableton, so check out the next video, where we'll take a look at how you can customize the browser to fit your workflow.