Ableton Forum

Hey folks,

I just finished moving all my old sample CDs into Live, so my lib is quite big (~160GB).
Furthermore we use subversion for versioning our tracks (4 producers from all over the country).

Now the locations of the SampleLibs differ on each producers machine, so opening a track after checkout from subversion results in waiting for about 15min until the local Live instance has determined where all the samples are.
We could use the feature of bundling all samples with the project, but this will bloat each projects size since the samples are available at every install anyways.

What I would like to see would be a smart index of all samples by a given "number" (I refer to the 3 Library folders for quick access in the left toolbar).
Ideally it would be some sort of local database (sqlite could fit the bill) with a structure like this:
- sample_id (int)
- sample_name (varchar)
- md5sum (varchar) -> a checksum of the samples content, since more than one sample could have the same names, although their content is different
- path_to_sample (varchar)

This is pretty much what we use internally (based on mysql though) but it runs very fast and it would speed up transfering projects by miles.

Ableton Developers: what do you think?

I too would like Live to have a database.

Currently if you search for something, it takes ages for Live to churn through the hard drive.

It would be much better for Live to find stuff instantly.

From a DJing point of view this is essential.

All DJ software I know creates a database of tracks so that the DJ can then search
by genre, year, BPM, comment etc. as well as the usual artist and title.

In Live at present, this is just not possible.

For musicians too, being able to search for a sample and get a result immediately would be much better.