rikhyray wrote:I think the whole new file/storing system was a sabotage done by Logic and Cubase united in the common interests to destroy the dangerous competitor at his strongest- CLARITY; SIMPLICITY; COMMON SENSE by planting that what they are masters of making simple things messy, unintuitive and useless. Robert has to find out if it was done by planting a saboteur or directly projecting the destructive ideas into the brains of Ableton developing team via wireless or satellite network . I wont be surprised to see 3D walnut panels and chrome knobs on the mixer of ver.7 plus 17 and half optional windows, and automatic trance creator VST.
That one makes me smile
Soooo. I'll try my best to at least describe better how the system works, and how we see it better than the Live 5 management, and even better than anything else on earth
(sorry, the smile is still on my face)
Seriously, let me first say that facts now tell that the system is not documented enough and we shall make a big effort in that direction. I will start here:
What Live 5 did: by choosing 'save as self contained', Live was creating a folder named after the song's name, aside from the Live set, containing ALL files from the set. If later on, while working on the set, you removed some clips and some data was not used, you had a warning window when saving and quiting the set, telling you 'XX, ZZ, YY files are no more in use, should I erase them?'
That had many disadvantages:
-ALL files were always included, even the ones from the Library, so you could end up having 100 times E-Kick 1.aif on your hard drive
-that worked only on a single set. If you had 20 variations of the same set, and were a bit safe about files, you would have 20 times the same files in different folder.
-when the warning window about files not used anymore came, if there were too many files, you could not even see all of the names, and you could not even 'review' these files, listen to them before deleting. This has been reported as very scary.
-there was no way to manipulate the data from Live, and it was scary to do so from outside.
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Now, how the Live 6 management file works:
!.You have this 'collect and save' command in the file menu, but I would say you should only do it that way if you don't bother copying the same files over and over in your projects. It works pretty much as the Live 5 'save as self contained', but put files in a sub-folder structure inside the Project folder. I do understand that some people here don't like this sub-folder structure. Point taken, it will be discussed. But the fact that all is in the Project folder is, i guess, very desirable, isn't it?
2.Otherwise, you can 'manage your project', via the file menu 'manage files', or with a right click on the project in the Live Browser. There, you can:
-see exactly how many files, sets, presets are contained in the Project folder.
-see which audio data is already included in the project folder
-see which data is not included and from other projects
-see which data is not included and from the Library
-see which samples are unused, so you can review them in the Browser by clicking 'show'. there, you can prelisten them, and if you want to get rid of them just select them all and press the DEL key on your computer. You can delete them individually or You can choose to keep some of them for some reason. to save them for later use, right click on the one you want, and choose 'show in explorer, so you can move it to a safe place.
3.The whole Project folder concept serves many purposes:
-you can have various versions of the same set within one project folder, or even all songs from one album, you can off course organize the sets or files in custom subfolder (in your computer's explorer) - and have only one instance of each sample used in all the sets
-you have everything in one single folder, named after the first set you saved in it, but you can off course rename the Project folder to your liking. So, to answer to scientist, the samples folder inside the Project folder does not have the name of the set (because there could be any sets referring to it), but the Project folder name is the reference.
-for organization purposes: a Project folder does not have to contain any set, and what I have, for example, is one Project folder named 'custom clips' for example, where I throw the clips I want to save for later use. I organize them in subfolders named accordingly. I can then inspect and see where the samples are from. So I don't include the ones from the Library, but I do include these from other projects or the external ones.
4.Now, for those of you who are organized and have an own custom Samples folder, you have different options, to be sure to identify these files and not include them:
-best is certainly to move that folder into the Library, so, when you manage your project, the samples used from that folder will be shown as 'from library', and you can choose not to include them
-otherwise, you can make that folder a project folder, by copying one of the 'Ableton Project Info' at its root, so, when managing your project, the samples from that folder will be seen as 'from other projects'. But, this will be confusing if you really used other samples from other real projects.
5.The subfolder structure in a Project is the same used in the Library, and that serves the purpose of being able to export a project into the Library. At the same time, the 'export to Library' feature respects a custom subfolder organization: if you created, in your project, a folder named 'my preferred samples' at the root of the Project folder, and you export it to your Library, there will be a 'my preferred samples' at the root of your Library.
The whole concept of Project folder is very common, and useful, but unlike Pro Tools for example that just has an 'audio files' folder inside its project folder, and no way to manage it properly but deleting unused samples, we try to provide more options to see and manage the content, for the very purpose of saving space and being safe about deleting files. It is quite easy to get rid of all recordings, or of all frozen files, or only some of them, to archive a file that is not used anymore in the project but has the best sound of all your recordings ever etc...
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I see how confusing all this is. I hope this post helps clarify, and more, understand a few concepts on how to work with Project folders and file management.
As a user now, in my own experience, and having worked on a huge project last september and october, requiring about 20 sets, as many 'sub-set' of bits of the final 1 hour project, I could not be more happy about this new system - at leas from the Live 5 one.
I took the time to understand the file management and to see how I could use it, and I was a happy camper. Never before, using Live 5 or other DAWs for these kind of huge projects (stage shows), I could achieve to save so much space, keep data crossing different versions and sub-versions of the same thing - and that means a lot when the final thing was already about 30 go - and more over, FELL SAFE about the whole process. Call me a fanboy
I don't want to convince you people, just give an experience.
Please let me know precisely how the new system comes into your way after having considered all of the above. There is always room for improvement, and we are listening. But it is good first to all start on the same line, the same understanding. So i would say, let's do it in two phases: first the understanding, then the wishes. right?
Kind regards,
Amaury
