Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by Stromkraft » Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:38 pm

pottering wrote:…loads of samples…
Please define with a number estimate. "Loads" is not a number estimate.
Make some music!

H20nly
Posts: 16058
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:15 pm
Location: The Wild West

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by H20nly » Fri Jun 29, 2018 10:41 pm

1,869,432

pottering
Posts: 1802
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:41 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by pottering » Fri Jun 29, 2018 11:22 pm

Stromkraft wrote:
pottering wrote:…loads of samples…
Please define with a number estimate. "Loads" is not a number estimate.
Here it is about 300.000 WAV and AIFF samples (250k WAV, 50k AIFF).

Anyhow, Live 10 works fine now, with the same files, in the same computer.
♥♥♥

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by Stromkraft » Sat Jun 30, 2018 7:45 am

H20nly wrote:1,869,432
You have 1.8 million Wav or Aiff files on your hard drives (must be multiple) right? How do you even choose anything? Amazing.
pottering wrote:
Here it is about 300.000 WAV and AIFF samples (250k WAV, 50k AIFF).

Anyhow, Live 10 works fine now, with the same files, in the same computer.
That's quite a few files, yes.

My problems with the browser isn't that it's slow or anything like that, but the fact it's not extremely useful finding stuff. Isn't that the biggest let down with that many samples? Or did you find a good way?

I simply attempt to use Audio Finder to handle my about 28000 samples. I can't say I do a great job, but I try.
Make some music!

groovyomega
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 10:47 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by groovyomega » Sun Jul 01, 2018 10:18 am

At this very moment my samples folder contains 3,953,005 objects (4 TB) only including audio and MIDI files / clips (no DAW project or library files, finished projects, mixdowns, stems, remix packs, acapellas, virtual instrument libraries, or music libraries included here).
Live 10 can handle it very well.

Indeed, what doesn't really work well is my favorite search function CMD+F, if I then enter a commonplace like "kick", "snare" or "crash", I may wait quite a while despite previous indexing. That's why I mainly work with the "Add Folder" function and add important subfolders to the sidebar as shortcuts. If these are selected, only the folder and its subfolders are searched, which works quite fast.

Here is another important hint that some Live users don't seem to notice. When searching via CMD-F, Live displays only files that can be used directly in Live (e.g. audio files, MIDI files, presets) but no folders and subfolders.
However, if you select a folder in the sidebar and then search directly via the search field (without CMD+F), the subfolder structure is also shown by Live, which is excellent. This has the enormous advantage that you get to the right areas very quickly, depending on the folder structure and its naming.

An example with respect to audio files, if I search for "house" via CMD+F, only audio files whose name contains "house" are displayed, e.g. "fat deep house kick.wav".

The advantage of searching with the pre-selected (added) folder is the following: If I select the folder "Loopmasters" in the sidebar, for example, and then enter "house" directly in the search above, I not only get audio files that contain the name "house", but also folders and subfolders that have the name in them! The trick is that I can now find a folder called "Fidget House", for example, and can open it immediately and find a substructure like Fidget House/Drum Hits/Kicks/FH_Kick_01.wav in it.

If I had searched through the general search, I would never have found the "FH_Kick_01.wav", because "house" is missing in the name itself. That's why I mainly search with pre-selected folders.

The overall trick is to simply name the top folder of a sample pack properly, that's enough! It's completely unnecessary to work with some special finders or third party apps - seriously how could I tag almost 4 million samples? The trick is simply to name the main folder explicit in the file itself - so this system can be used immediately in any DAW browser (which can search for files & folders).

For example, if a sample pack is only called "Division", I probably won't find it often enough sometime later, because the name is too abstract, so I will assign hashtags to the folder name myself when buying or adding it to my sample folder, after listening through it for a few minutes, the folder will be called "Division (#chillout #house #ambient)", done!

If I ever make ambient music now, all I have to do is search for "ambient" and I'll get the sample pack "Division" with all its subfolders where I can use the individual elements. The whole system works without having to tag every single sample. A hashtag is required at most for the main sample pack folder, if the name itself does not already include it (e.g. "Mega Super Deep House Drums", no tags needed at least for me).

Actually, I didn't want to write that much. What I really want to bring up as a feature request is what Cubase, Bitwig and Reaper can already do.
Use multiple search words to search across files AND folders(!) directly from the CMD-F search function.

With this simple system it is so easy to have the 4 million samples completely under control and to work really emotionally in the flow.

Right in this moment I would like a "Reggae Snare", for example. CMD+F and "reggae snare" and Live could find a file right here:

Samples/Niche Audio/Dub & Reggae/Single Hits/Drums/Snares/77892snare.wav

The file would be found because the name Reggae and Snare are in the path, although you didn't even have to tag anything here! Add only one hashtag to the parent folder if the name itself is not clear enough.

With Cubase 9.5 this works incredibly well - but Cubase can't handle the 4 TB - the search goes on forever. Reaper does this fine, but searches every time (no indexing) and Bitwig makes it felt almost in real time including my whole 4 TB of samples.

PS: Why the hell do you have or need 4 million samples? If you've been making music for 20 years and are a collector, hunter and field recorder, then you accumulate a lot. It's enough to own the legendary samples.kb6.de donation ware sample library, that's a library with over 32,000 samples. Then you buy Drums Overkill from Best Service and you have another 27,000 drum samples on the record. And these are only two libraries with more than 50,000 files. I mean, the Ableton Live Suite content alone is over 70GB in size. Whether this is healthy or not is another question. But with this simple system, that the main folder of the sample pack has a revealing name - you can find almost anything.

Sorry for the long post. Here's a synthesizer cat:
Image

Angstrom
Posts: 14921
Joined: Mon Oct 04, 2004 2:22 pm
Contact:

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by Angstrom » Sun Jul 01, 2018 12:43 pm

groovyomega wrote: ... >>browser tips & workarounds<< ...
A quality post !
+ A few things I hadn't tried in there. I mainly user ctrl & f - which as you mentioned returns poor results. I name everything with my "tags" in the file name.

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by Nokatus » Sun Jul 01, 2018 7:38 pm

Another one with millions of files here, and I use exactly the same naming strategy (search-significant path names, etc etc) as groovyomega, but I use Everything by Voidtools to do the searches -- and in turn, I keep absolutely minimal content in actual Live locations, for example. "Everything" is amazingly fast, truly, as it's the perfect match for these types of search strategies, indexing only file and path names, not file content/meta.

"Everything only indexes file and folder names and generally takes a few seconds to build its database. A fresh install of Windows 10 (about 120,000 files) will take about 1 second to index. 1,000,000 files will take about 1 minute."

I've used it for years now, and it takes so little resources it's... crazy. Excellent for a DAW system. It can match full paths, you can use regexp, there's plenty of control for you to customize the search workings, you can drag and drop from the results, and the results appear in realtime (literally) instantly as you type, even with a huge amount of files, and... that sort of thing.

Pardon the gushing review, I'm not affiliated in any way, it's just that this lovely piece of code is one of the main tools I personally use to get these types of things done, fast (along with Resonic and Total Commander, with direct associations set up in Everything, so that a directory opens in Total Commander when double clicking a path, and an audio file opens in Resonic when double clicking the actual file name. And so on. Ahhhh.)

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/

Edit: I've slightly gushed about it in this very thread three years ago, it seems, haha. Well, it's just that good :D !

H20nly
Posts: 16058
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:15 pm
Location: The Wild West

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by H20nly » Thu Jul 05, 2018 4:46 pm

for posterity... and *bookmark*
groovyomega wrote:At this very moment my samples folder contains 3,953,005 objects (4 TB) only including audio and MIDI files / clips (no DAW project or library files, finished projects, mixdowns, stems, remix packs, acapellas, virtual instrument libraries, or music libraries included here).
Live 10 can handle it very well.

Indeed, what doesn't really work well is my favorite search function CMD+F, if I then enter a commonplace like "kick", "snare" or "crash", I may wait quite a while despite previous indexing. That's why I mainly work with the "Add Folder" function and add important subfolders to the sidebar as shortcuts. If these are selected, only the folder and its subfolders are searched, which works quite fast.

Here is another important hint that some Live users don't seem to notice. When searching via CMD-F, Live displays only files that can be used directly in Live (e.g. audio files, MIDI files, presets) but no folders and subfolders.
However, if you select a folder in the sidebar and then search directly via the search field (without CMD+F), the subfolder structure is also shown by Live, which is excellent. This has the enormous advantage that you get to the right areas very quickly, depending on the folder structure and its naming.

An example with respect to audio files, if I search for "house" via CMD+F, only audio files whose name contains "house" are displayed, e.g. "fat deep house kick.wav".

The advantage of searching with the pre-selected (added) folder is the following: If I select the folder "Loopmasters" in the sidebar, for example, and then enter "house" directly in the search above, I not only get audio files that contain the name "house", but also folders and subfolders that have the name in them! The trick is that I can now find a folder called "Fidget House", for example, and can open it immediately and find a substructure like Fidget House/Drum Hits/Kicks/FH_Kick_01.wav in it.

If I had searched through the general search, I would never have found the "FH_Kick_01.wav", because "house" is missing in the name itself. That's why I mainly search with pre-selected folders.

The overall trick is to simply name the top folder of a sample pack properly, that's enough! It's completely unnecessary to work with some special finders or third party apps - seriously how could I tag almost 4 million samples? The trick is simply to name the main folder explicit in the file itself - so this system can be used immediately in any DAW browser (which can search for files & folders).

For example, if a sample pack is only called "Division", I probably won't find it often enough sometime later, because the name is too abstract, so I will assign hashtags to the folder name myself when buying or adding it to my sample folder, after listening through it for a few minutes, the folder will be called "Division (#chillout #house #ambient)", done!

If I ever make ambient music now, all I have to do is search for "ambient" and I'll get the sample pack "Division" with all its subfolders where I can use the individual elements. The whole system works without having to tag every single sample. A hashtag is required at most for the main sample pack folder, if the name itself does not already include it (e.g. "Mega Super Deep House Drums", no tags needed at least for me).

Actually, I didn't want to write that much. What I really want to bring up as a feature request is what Cubase, Bitwig and Reaper can already do.
Use multiple search words to search across files AND folders(!) directly from the CMD-F search function.

With this simple system it is so easy to have the 4 million samples completely under control and to work really emotionally in the flow.

Right in this moment I would like a "Reggae Snare", for example. CMD+F and "reggae snare" and Live could find a file right here:

Samples/Niche Audio/Dub & Reggae/Single Hits/Drums/Snares/77892snare.wav

The file would be found because the name Reggae and Snare are in the path, although you didn't even have to tag anything here! Add only one hashtag to the parent folder if the name itself is not clear enough.

With Cubase 9.5 this works incredibly well - but Cubase can't handle the 4 TB - the search goes on forever. Reaper does this fine, but searches every time (no indexing) and Bitwig makes it felt almost in real time including my whole 4 TB of samples.

PS: Why the hell do you have or need 4 million samples? If you've been making music for 20 years and are a collector, hunter and field recorder, then you accumulate a lot. It's enough to own the legendary samples.kb6.de donation ware sample library, that's a library with over 32,000 samples. Then you buy Drums Overkill from Best Service and you have another 27,000 drum samples on the record. And these are only two libraries with more than 50,000 files. I mean, the Ableton Live Suite content alone is over 70GB in size. Whether this is healthy or not is another question. But with this simple system, that the main folder of the sample pack has a revealing name - you can find almost anything.

Sorry for the long post. Here's a synthesizer cat:
Image
thx for taking the time... and the cat.

groovyomega
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 10:47 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by groovyomega » Thu Jul 19, 2018 9:52 am

This could be of interest for you. It's free and actually works quite well: https://www.adsrsounds.com/product/soft ... e-manager/
However, I prefer to use the internal browser of a DAW just for the easy / minimalistic approach of it. I hope Ableton will include multiple (tag/file/folders) search in the future soon.

bakku
Posts: 38
Joined: Wed Sep 23, 2009 4:11 am

Re: Live 9 browser NIGHTMARE !!!

Post by bakku » Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:46 pm

I don’t know why Ableton would not add non indexed folders in browser.

Large Database is similar to a cancer cell, It’s getting bigger, can cause performance degradation and database malfunction.

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