Ableton Forum

Not sure if I'm doing this right but I just started using a couple of features that make things more simple and keep my hard drive from over-flowing.

When I'm recording some vocals, and I have like 6 or more takes, i go through them one by one, deleting all the crappy parts and silences. I slice the useful takes into separate blocks and rename them (eg. verse 1, verse 2, verse 2 b, chrous a....etc). Then I highlight all the keeper parts and right-click them, selecting the crop clip(s) option. This creates a bunch of individual new audio files. Then I hit save.

The last step is I go into the file menu and select 'manage project'. From the file manager on the right I click on 'unused samples', and then on the browser I highlight them and hit delete!

.....500+ megabytes of saved space!

Hope this helps someone,
B.

Also - check your freeze files periodically - I went a while without checking and had 68GB of frozen files because freeze saves everything in 32 bit float which is very large filesize wise, especially at higher samplerates. I was able to rescue most of this.

If you have lots of projects you don't really revisit but wish to keep for archival purposes *in case you do a compilation, or a remix etc.* unfreeze all the frozen files, and then delete the frozen versions from the freeze file folder. You can always refreeze those files again should you revisit that project.

Also check your audio files. Every time you record a take, that audio is saved, even though you might only use one take (the one in your session or arrangement etc). You can then find all the duff takes and delete that audio. This can add up to many GBs if you don't do this often.

I´m a mess with cleaning up projects before they are released and never delete anything, smile.

Especially with vocal takes I experienced a couple of times that I reedited some parts later with previously not chosen parts.

And 500 MB doesn´t cost a lot with todays terrabyte drives.

500MB is not much.

But I honestly has 68 (SIXTY-EIGHT) GIGABYTES of freeze files on a 300GB external drive, which only had 100 GB left.

[quote="leedsquietman"]500MB is not much.

quote]

true, but it starts to add up pretty quick...

yah but he had 68 gb

in your face!

you're right swett though, every little helps !

Someone's gonna come on with 100+ gbs in their clean up and with a bigger dad than mine ....