Hi Everyone,
I have my "User Library"selected as the place to save my projects. (my drive/music/ableton/user library). Is this a good place to have selected for my songs to be saved?
Also, should I be seeing a folder in there or an .als file after I saved?
I recently lost some preliminary projects while learning Live's process, which is ok, but now I am ready to work on some songs I've written and want to make sure I understand the best way and place to save my songs.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help me out.
Saving my songs...
Re: Saving my songs...
The User Library is not a good place to save songs
The reason
Ableton songs (.als files) exist inside Ableton Project Folders. Ableton Project folders have a defined structure and are designed to hold a bunch of resources for related songs which exist inside that project.
The Library is already a special kind of "project" and projects cannot exist inside projects. This means that you will not be able to manage your song samples or backups very well.
The More Detailed Reason
If you change your save location to somewhere outside of the User Library this is what should happen:
When you save a new song such as "my funky new song.als" Live will automatically create a Project folder called "my funky new song" and save your .als song into it. Also inside that new project folder will be sub-folders such as "/samples/recorded" and "/Backup". When you save different versions of your song, for example "my funky song dub version.als" Live knows that it can use the samples and project information saved in the master project folder. So all those samples and any presets which are in the project can be managed by using the browser features such as "Current Project" (in the Browser Places). The user can manage the song and all of the other related songs, and the samples in the project by going to File Menu->Manage Files and choosing options such as Manage Set, Manage Project. etc. These allow us to delete unused recordings, to package up the set. etc.
If the song is saved into the User Library that means the project which the song belongs to is ... everything. When the user chooses "Manage Project" to eliminate samples which are unused ... it will look at every sample you ever made, and it will try and cross correlate those samples into every song you ever made.
Example
One of my projects usually has around 20 .als files inside it.
If my songs were instead saved into the User Library I would only have one project and it would have around 17,000 files inside it. Every time I tried to perform an action on any song it would need to look at each of those 17,000 files. So Live would slow to a crawl.
tl;dr don't save songs into the User Library
The reason
Ableton songs (.als files) exist inside Ableton Project Folders. Ableton Project folders have a defined structure and are designed to hold a bunch of resources for related songs which exist inside that project.
The Library is already a special kind of "project" and projects cannot exist inside projects. This means that you will not be able to manage your song samples or backups very well.
The More Detailed Reason
If you change your save location to somewhere outside of the User Library this is what should happen:
When you save a new song such as "my funky new song.als" Live will automatically create a Project folder called "my funky new song" and save your .als song into it. Also inside that new project folder will be sub-folders such as "/samples/recorded" and "/Backup". When you save different versions of your song, for example "my funky song dub version.als" Live knows that it can use the samples and project information saved in the master project folder. So all those samples and any presets which are in the project can be managed by using the browser features such as "Current Project" (in the Browser Places). The user can manage the song and all of the other related songs, and the samples in the project by going to File Menu->Manage Files and choosing options such as Manage Set, Manage Project. etc. These allow us to delete unused recordings, to package up the set. etc.
If the song is saved into the User Library that means the project which the song belongs to is ... everything. When the user chooses "Manage Project" to eliminate samples which are unused ... it will look at every sample you ever made, and it will try and cross correlate those samples into every song you ever made.
Example
One of my projects usually has around 20 .als files inside it.
If my songs were instead saved into the User Library I would only have one project and it would have around 17,000 files inside it. Every time I tried to perform an action on any song it would need to look at each of those 17,000 files. So Live would slow to a crawl.
tl;dr don't save songs into the User Library
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PalmAndPine
- Posts: 6
- Joined: Fri Apr 13, 2018 2:10 pm
Re: Saving my songs...
Thank you. I have gone through my songs and saved them out (and collected) to another folder as you outlined. I appreciate your guidance on this. It saved me from performance troubles I have already started to experience. Now everything is running very well. Cheers.