Ableton Forum

Hey everyone
I am having a hard time figuring out the difference between the Save As command and the Save a Copy command. Is this a question of computer hierarchy or a question of Ableton hierarchy? Help distinguishing this would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!

It's just a question of choice how you want to organize different versions of your work.

Let's assume you start a new Live Set MySet.als.

You save it a number of times, at one point you think it's time to start a new fork. 'Save As' MySet01.als; MySet.als gets left behind in its last saved state, and you go on working with MySet1.als until you feel like going into another fork, MySet02.als.

The other scenario: You keep working on MySet.als throughout the whole lifecycle of the project and 'Save As Copy' MySet[YYMMDD].als everytime you want to take a snapshot of a given state. You keep these MySet[YYMMDD]s as a sort of backup, you can resort to when you feel like you have taken a wrong turn.

Thank you for your help!

once you start getting any kind of good feeling about the framework of your new track... it's a real good time to slip a copy off to the side.

i've lost stuff that i still have in my head but i cannot remake...
maybe it's my mind wanting the original version to a fault. if i had just leaned back in my chair, smiled, leaned forward and clicked File > Save As... i could A/B both copies and find out.

Anyone else notice the question was asked in November 2015 but replied back with thanks in 2018?

That is a long time to ponder.

oh snap

he should have waited until next week

also fwiw, the "save a copy" feature doesn't remove the undo/redo states, like the save as or save options (at least this is the case in live 9 and before. live 10 remedied this). don't know how many times i've accidentally hit save but needed undo or redo something and then had to go redo a bunch of stuff manually.

I think this needs clarification. It took me quite some time to figure out what the difference is, because saving wise there is no difference between 'save as' and 'save a copy', the real differenc lies in what happens after saving: with 'save as' you are going to work on the newly saved version while with 'save a copy' you stay on your current version and the copy is just saved aside. This also explains why the undo still works with 'save a copy'. You can tell the switch of the project by looking at the top bar with the filename.

Personally I only use 'save as' and change from v-1.1 to v-1.2, v-1.3 and so on while I always continue working on the just saved version.

luz-io wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 14, 2020 6:26 pm

Personally I only use 'save as' and change from v-1.1 to v-1.2, v-1.3 and so on while I always continue working on the just saved version.

this works best, imho.

post is still old as dirt though