Ableton Forum

+1 for unlimited collections

+1. More collections. Abandon the colors entirely and have nested folders. That would be much more useful than a flat set of only a few colors.

+1 I would be very happy if the amount of colours were doubled.


I use the colours to sort my plugins and ableton racks in to manageable categories.

RED - Sounds
ORANGE - Reverbs/Delays
YELLOW - Effects/Filters/Pitch
GREEN - Saturation/Distortion/Colour
BLUE - Dynamics/Shaping/Width
PURPLE - Compression/EQ/Strips
GREY - Limiting/Clipping/Utility/MIDI

As you can imagine some of these categories are still very messy. More colours would be great for me to help me organise my racks and plugin collection.

Also, a feature to highlight/'star'/favourite items within the colour categories would be excellent too. So that in my PURPLE category I can highlight my favourite, most used EQ plugins for example. Perhaps a "FAVOURITE" exclusive non-colour collection category, that instead inverts the colour of the items name or places a unique symbol BEFORE the items name.

I don’t find the colours in Collections particularly useful.

But being able to organise the countless thousands of sounds, samples, plugins, packs, racks, audio effects, MIDI effects... within a large number of user created and customised folders and sub-folders... That would be great.

Also adding user defined hierarchal metadata tags that you could apply to the thousands of sounds, samples, plugins... and they were searchable... would also be great.

Although developing an underlying DB for this feature would probably be thousands of hours development time. (NI did it of course.)

I agree we should be able to use more colours, but I've found a couple of workarounds that work for me, at least as far as organising plygins goes.
The key is that you can tag folders in your User Library so they appear in a collection.
For vst3 plugins, I created a folder called All VST3 in my library then added subfolders for the categories I wanted. I then went through my vst3s and saved a preset for each one to the relevant folder. You can add one plugin to several groups if that works for you. Or you can create nested folders if you want. I then just tagged all these folders with one colour. Now I have a categorised collection of VST3s.
VST2 don't work thus way. I only have a few, and they're mostly synths, so I just use one collection for all of them.
So now I have VST3, VST2 and Synths collections and I can at least use the rest of the colours for files/samples. Given that I can rearrange my sample collection however I want, and I can tag those folders or just add them to the Places list, I can live with 7 colours.
But more would be better!!

I'd also love to see this.

+1 more collection colors

+1 for more colours. Black, white, bright blue (aquamarine), pink. PLZZZZZ Ableton!

+1 for more collection colors

+1

And a possibly a more sophisticated sampler manager, where samples can be tagged with attributes such as loop/oneshot, BPM, key etc.

yes I agree with all the above this would be extremely helpful

I just registered on the forum because of this thread ...

It is incredible for how long this is going on. And how little the devs at Ableton actually seem to care about this topic. In this day and age, having a good tagbased and highly customizeable library system is the only suitable answer to an otherwise unmanageable amount of music-production related files.

Yes, it is great to have clips and grooves and presets and racks and maxforlive and vst and whatnot. But if I cannot find stuff quickly, all this great potential is sitting in some sort of digital dumpster, unheard, unused and effectively dead.

I don't know how many times I called Ableton support and told them what would be useful in my opinion. This was around version 8 and 9 and - with fresh energy for giving constructive input - again around version 10. And for sure I was not the only one. And yet: Nothing fundamental ever happened.

We are given a COLOUR BASED metatag system. To hell with colours!!!
This is a nice addon but by no means it will be able to provide what we need.
It might come into play as eyecandy when all the hard matter is sorted.

In fact, I have only one aproach that is valid for me at this point: I vote with my feet. Or rather: with my credit card. Version 11? Without me, thanks for the offer.
I even went to some lengths to explain all this in teh recent user survey. And also in the one before that. Back then, actually, with a lot more passion and patience and explanatory detail.
Now, I am just fed up.

Recently, I bought Bitwig and Reaper. They both sit in diffeent areas of my workflow.
DO they do what Live does? Not really. Are they perfect? Nope.
But they do not come with years of agony and frustration - especially since I bought quite a few packs and cannot use them anywhere except for Ableton.

So, sorry to say, Ableton: But if this does not change, I will not come back with another cent.
And I really hate to say this. Since I loved Ableton for many years and I still think it's a great DAW in many places ...

I agree with some of the other comments in the thread, the colors are nice but what everyone seems to want is a folder system that can contain subfolders for organizing material.

While I'm not opposed to more colors, I think the real solution would be a folder system that can be changed and sorted through. Unlimited colors could be very messy and I don't think they were meant to be used in that way.