file management improvements...put em here

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:36 pm

joeyfivecents wrote:more choices for audio recording paths. If we could choose different hard drives for each track when recording multiple inputs it might stop the disk overload button from blinking so frequently. Pro Tools and FL Studio both have this and it's really the only thing keeping me from using Live exclusively in live tracking situations. I guess this could be considered file management.

are you using your internal drive or an external fw? i had a pb12" before my current macbook, and had poor performance running a fw drive alongside my fw audio interface. i did the two partition thing for a while, that worked okay...but the solution was a 7200 rpm unpartitioned internal drive with plenty of extra space. currently i'm running a macbook with 100gig 7200rpm internal, and i rarely have disk problems. even when running tons of tracks.

mercyplease · Post by **mercyplease** » Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:04 am

I FEEL STRONGLY ON DAWS FILE MANAGEMENT

Its been a fashionable thing for the past few years to add fancy file management stuff in daws. pro tools logic cubase sonar dp all have file management stuff and NONE OF THEM work well as can be seen by visiting any of their forums. In fact most musicians dont like them very much. Software companies like them because it gives the illusion of added features and many users on this forum love it because they perefr messing about and tidying up their files rather than writing a song
as usual though abletons is easily the most complicated and convulted of the daw file management. the more they add to this the more complicated and bloated its going to get. i dont look forward to it. my suggestion is to scrap it and replace it with a much more simple but functional browser file management system.
get rid of it

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 5:12 am

one more, not sure if this is possible. if an os search function (in particular osx's) can search through gigs and gigs of filenames (and even within emails and text files) in mere seconds, what's stopping live from tapping into that functionality for its own browser? when a set is loaded that contains missing samples, or when you want to 'manage library', couldn't the os search function act as a preliminary agent...essentially use it to gather information regarding filetype and filename? then from that point live could go about its library management and sample replace functions much more efficiently.

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 1:29 am

finally had a chance to spend some time reorganizing projects with the new file management features and came up with a couple suggestions.
1. there seems to be a problem with incomplete indexing: i can set the path for missing sample searches, and live doesn't find files that exist (they can be found using osx's search function). we need a dialogue box telling us that a search failed because of incomplete indexing. this may be a bug. i even tested by setting the search path to the folder that i knew contained the missing samples.
2. the 'collect and save' option that appears at the bottom of the file management window should also appear in the 'file' drop down menu grouped with the 'manage files...' option. as it stands the current "collect all and save" option is easily misconstrued. it should probably read as "collect and save library/project" under 'manage files...' and "collect and save live set" instead of 'collect all and save' (the 'all' being misleading).

tylast · Post by **tylast** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 6:38 pm

scientist wrote:1. there seems to be a problem with incomplete indexing: i can set the path for missing sample searches, and live doesn't find files that exist (they can be found using osx's search function). we need a dialogue box telling us that a search failed because of incomplete indexing. this may be a bug. i even tested by setting the search path to the folder that i knew contained the missing samples.

I've noticed this too. I converted quite a few WAVs to FLAC. Live found most, but not all the files. The names (minus the file extension) and locations were the same. Why did Live only find some of the files?

joeyfivecents · Post by **joeyfivecents** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 5:09 pm

scientist wrote:
joeyfivecents wrote:more choices for audio recording paths. If we could choose different hard drives for each track when recording multiple inputs it might stop the disk overload button from blinking so frequently. Pro Tools and FL Studio both have this and it's really the only thing keeping me from using Live exclusively in live tracking situations. I guess this could be considered file management.
are you using your internal drive or an external fw? i had a pb12" before my current macbook, and had poor performance running a fw drive alongside my fw audio interface. i did the two partition thing for a while, that worked okay...but the solution was a 7200 rpm unpartitioned internal drive with plenty of extra space. currently i'm running a macbook with 100gig 7200rpm internal, and i rarely have disk problems. even when running tons of tracks.

So did you put an extra HD in your powerbook? If so, tell me how and were there any problems? What about a usb2 ext drive?

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Thu Apr 26, 2007 3:55 pm

yeah, i put a 100gig seagate 7200 rpm in, and bought a usb 2.0 enclosure for the one i took out. replacing the drive is easy. pull out the battery, unscrew an angled metal strip that covers the hd and ram, and there's a little tray that slides out with the hd on it. then i use carbon copy cloner to clone the drive to the one in the usb enclosure, so if anything goes wrong i can just pop the old one in. the catch? the 100gig drive has died...twice. both times the computer sounded like an airplane taking off (fan just winding up and up), the screen froze and on restart i could hear the hard drive clicking. my best guess is it had to do with boot camp drivers (virtual partition stuff) and heat management...as both times it died i had recently installed and used boot camp. since the last replacement i switched to using parallels and haven't had any problems.

BigBuddha · Post by **BigBuddha** » Thu Apr 26, 2007 9:32 pm

I want my EIC on external HD.

Poster · Post by **Poster** » Thu May 24, 2007 1:13 pm

finding missing samples can be a pain in the ...

i even set the folder Live has to search the samples in because I know they are there,
then hit GO,
it doesn't even find them..

I have to check 'fully rescan folders' and then it finally finds them but it can take ages to do so because of the fully rescan option..

w h y ?

Moodlez · Post by **Moodlez** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:48 pm

Hi everyone. First post on here. I'm a reg on the ALDJ forums.

I'm still in the process of learning to use Live for dj'ing, but I had an idea regarding file management that I think would be great for dj'ing and really anything else you can do with the software.

Basically, I'd like to be able to link audio files, whether they're entire songs, loops, samples or whatever, to each other during live sessions and save them to a color coded databass for future use. For example, let's say you're in the middle of a live set and throw on "track a" and are in the process of cueing up your next clip. So when you pull up the browser to start searching for the next thing you want to play the feature will populate a list of everything you've linked to "track a" in previous sessions as a rough guide to where you can go from there. As I mentioned earlier I think it would be good to have this databass be color coordinated to the colors of the actual clips so you could perhaps code stuff by genre (or whatever suits your purpose). The databass could also be listed by date so the user could go back as far as they wanted to revisit stuff they hadn't played in a long time and perhaps forgotten about altogether.

I've seen some negative reactions to this idea in that it might stifle the spontaneaity and experimentation that makes dj'ing such an amazing thing, but I disagree. The databass would be built from the users specifications, which could only come from experimenting and lots of practice. And regardless of whether or not you're using Live to dj, I get the impression that most users of this software have immense stockpiles of audio files. I think a tool like this would help people become much more organized and would help maximize their sound collections.

Sorry for the novel. If anyone knows of a software for me to do this that's out there already please let me know.

onslaught · Post by **onslaught** » Sat May 26, 2007 7:42 am

Moodlez wrote:If anyone knows of a software for me to do this that's out there already please let me know.

Mac or PC?
In MAC OS X you could select the clip or sample in Lives' browser, right click, choose 'show in Finder' then in Finder set a color label to the file. Then set up smart folders fo each color label. Probably not exactly what you want, but workable and would give you a taste if it actually works for you. I'm sure there's something similar one could do in Windows.

Mike Goodwin · Post by **Mike Goodwin** » Sun May 27, 2007 4:17 pm

onslaught wrote:thread from 'General' forum http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59102

scientist wrote:option dragging a clip to the browser copies the clip and its associated audio file to the dragged-to location. if the location is not a 'project' folder, a window could prompt us asking if we would like to make it one.
this could easily exist along with the current library management system, essentially allowing users to manage files as they would in their os.
This is needed for instrument presets also. Maybe something like: saving Impulse preset 'Kit001', have the option to save all corresponding samples in a folder that sits right next to the preset.

Search needs to be faster! At the moment it is slow, constantly hangs and closest word I can thnk at the moment is it's 'clunky'. Why cannot Live use the OS's system search (aka Spotlight-Mac OS X and Windows search) Spotlight is redicuously quicker for searching with. While I think Ableton have avoided using OS specific search so that both Mac and Windows versions act the same, at this point I'm inclined to think they should bite the bullet. Maybe there's reasons various reasons why Ableton have not done this, but even if it was an option, so WE could decide which way to search.

Search doesn't always work and/or files get lost, even when already collected and saved. The current searching is inconsistent. Please improve.

Explicit documentation. eg: extra uses for .cfg files, info like Amaury has posted in above linked thread.

Being able to keep audio with clips when draged into folders in the library is NEEDED.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Tue May 29, 2007 2:51 pm

^^^^^ hell yes

I had some really aggravating stuff going on yesterday, just trying to record a clip and pull it over into the library.

It seems that there is absolutely no way to open a fresh set, record some clips, and put them permanently in the library, without first saving the set.

But I don't really want to save the set! I just want to record a few things and put them into the browser. I ended up making a project called "working" which I can use to do this type of thing.

Without saving first, the audio files are in the temp folder and can't be brought out ("file is in use" errors, etc)

So

Open set
Set up track for recording
Record clip
Crop or Edit
-Crop: Pro...No 2nd program, automatically replaces clip Con...2nd copy of sample in /processed/crop
-Edit: Pro: could do other processes? Con... 2nd program, have to navigate save location manually, 2nd copy of file, need to replace manually after returning to ableton
Save set in Project or create Project
Drag Live Clips to browser location
Manage Clips
Export clip samples to Library (samples go to Imported/ directory)

That's not really where I'd like the samples to go, but it seems the only viable option, because to move them to another location means another round of replacing samples and saving clips.

Please tell me I'm missing something

Moodlez · Post by **Moodlez** » Tue May 29, 2007 8:18 pm

onslaught wrote:
Moodlez wrote:If anyone knows of a software for me to do this that's out there already please let me know.
Mac or PC?
In MAC OS X you could select the clip or sample in Lives' browser, right click, choose 'show in Finder' then in Finder set a color label to the file. Then set up smart folders fo each color label. Probably not exactly what you want, but workable and would give you a taste if it actually works for you. I'm sure there's something similar one could do in Windows.

I'm on a pc at the moment and will look into doing something like this with Windows. Thanks!

aviavi · Post by **aviavi** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:38 pm

Live's file management needs to work much much faster. It gets bogged down with the simplest task -- like replacing one "missing" sample.

And as others have pointed out, it is extremely buggy, since it does not find files that are sitting right there in the folder that one can point the find function towards.

Really needs serious work...

file management improvements...put em here

Re: file management improvements...put em here