Ableton Forum

Wednesday Mac died, New Mac today, is there an easy way to transfer Ableton?

I have Ableton Live Suite, with all Packs loaded, and SOOO much more.
I have my old Mac's SSD HD in a USB Enclosure plugged into my new Mac.
I have my old Mac's TimeMachine HD plugged into my new MAC.
My old Mac was Sierra 10.12.6, my new Mac is Mojave 10.14.1.

Is there an easy way to transfer all the required bits without reinstalling everything from scratch?

Doubt it.

You should be able to just copy your library, packs and samples over along with projects but all your software and VSTs would need reinstall to install all the dependencies and config files unless you created a backup that can be restored (which since you ask I assume not).

Good time to learn about backups and how to make sure you never need to ask this question again in the future, or worse, how to recover your personal data from a failed drive.

Is there a specific reason you don’t want to to a full-slather Time Machine clone of your old world on to your new Mac? Or a Migration Assistant transfer from your old SSD?

These would seem to be the easiest ways to ensure continuity of, well... everything?

I literally just did this yesterday.
Of course transferring all Ableton related settings is fairly easy and straightforward. It's a pleasure to launch Live on a different machine and feel like it's not a new machine.
But yeah, 3rd party plugins will need to be re-installed and authorised. I use a very few of them so it was ok, but sure it can be a bit of a nightmare if you rely on them heavily.

I could have simply clone my 1st machine's hard drive to my new machine's one, but even though I'm pretty organised I felt like it was a good opportunity to start with a fresh system (but staying on El Capitan of course!). But using the cloning technic certainly is the most straightforward way to go. I've done it in the past, and you've got virtually nothing else to do that clone, start your "new" machine, and keep on doing what you were doing the day before.

If I were you, I'd try to clone your old HD first, mainly to avoid Mojave if possible.

the biggest pain in the butt for me has been the de-authorising of software from the old machine, which is sometimes impossible if the old machine is no longer working.

as for Mojave, i haven't had any issues with it so far, and i love the fact that it has dark mode support baked in...