organizing sets & samples in OSX? Help a newbie please!

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
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scotty
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Joined: Thu Apr 18, 2002 10:20 pm
Location: california, usa
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organizing sets & samples in OSX? Help a newbie please!

Post by scotty » Thu Sep 25, 2003 9:12 pm

I just got a new powerbook and it's my first time using OSX so I'm not very wise to the ways of how files and directories are organized. Where do you all save your sets and samples to? Live defaulted to wanting to save my set to the "documents" folder but it seems like that might get really cluttered as a catch-all for all applications. In general how do you organize/manage your live-related files under OSX?

Sorry it's such a naive question, but live is the only app I've installed so far and I have no point of comparison!

many thanks in advance for any tips or suggestions for organization.
scotty

crunchpod
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 27, 2003 12:31 am

Post by crunchpod » Sat Sep 27, 2003 10:37 am

Hello!

I'm pretty sure when you go through the Live preferences under OSX, you can set the "save to" folder to pretty much any folder you already have or even create a new one specifically to store Live related files. I keep all of my music related files under a specific folder (named after my band) and then when Live prompted me for a "save to" folder I just used the "create new folder" option and made a folder that I named "Live files" or something along those lines (sorry I can't be more precise, I don't have my laptop with me right now).

OSX is arranged much differently than previous Mac OS versions. Once you can master the whole "Home" directory concept it all falls into place though.

Best of luck!

-Ben

scotty
Posts: 79
Joined: Thu Apr 18, 2002 10:20 pm
Location: california, usa
Contact:

Post by scotty » Sun Sep 28, 2003 9:00 am

crunchpod wrote:Hello!

OSX is arranged much differently than previous Mac OS versions. Once you can master the whole "Home" directory concept it all falls into place though.
Oh! hey Ben! Didn't realize you lurked here (this is scotty from (the ill-named) cruelty campaign)... hope all is well up north (and say hi to Mark!). Anyway... As for where people save stuff... So you put your band folder under your user directory? Yeah I guess it doesn't matter too much where stuff goes. I'll probably end up doing the same as you, but wanted to check here first in case there was a standard or methodology that I should perhaps follow.

Thanks!
scotty

saladspinatra

wheredigo?-"chocolate the clown"

Post by saladspinatra » Mon Sep 29, 2003 8:53 pm

actually I think it's a really great question. I skimmed through this forum completely and got some preliminary tips. I'm sorry my web savy is not all there or I'd link you directly to them. Just look. the key word is preliminary. A little setting up now will save you a lot of heartache later. Why? because you have a nice computer and you don't want all these dangling dingleberry samples duplicating themselves and hiding in corners all over the place. Also, if you do a little thinking now, the habbit will be easier to establish. You've got three folders which you can preset right in live, and at least one person on the forum arranges his icons as buttons in osX and makes room for them on the bottom of the screen. In the preferences pane you can assign a default sample editor, your vst folder, and a folder for sessions to be saved to. You've got colors to correspond to diferent kinds of clips, tracks you can rename, and two sets of everything it you're not using the AB crossfader for more traditional purposes. Also, you can rename the samples you are using, and save the clips and your edits to them.

On the subject of optimization, I like to put my sessions on a separate drive than my application software. There's less looking around on the single drive this way. DAE systems take advantage of this with multipule drives, but because Live sets use a self-contained option, I'm thinking this is getting carried away. Ableton probably knows somthing I don't about locating and utilizing sources from the disk.

I'm deliberately being general because I've set things up for my self in a secret way. But to be honest, you'd probably want to set things up so that fits your own musical sense. 8O

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