Ableton Forum

hello ableton users.

Is there an easy quick way to combine two live sets into one?
Thanks!
Brian

Navigate to the Live Set (.als file) from inside Live's built-in browser. There you can:

-Drag the .als file into the current Set. It will merge with the current Set.
-Unfold the .als file to show its contained tracks, and drag them into the current Set.
-Unfold the tracks to show their contained Clips, and drag them into the current Set.

Unfortunately, you can't drag-n-drop Return tracks, they have to be re-created manually. (But you can Rack your return FX and save them as presets to open into the new Set). Also any MIDI and QWERTY assignments aren't copied, and will have to be re-created manually.

Pitch Black wrote:Also any MIDI ... assignments aren't copied, and will have to be re-created manually.

Which is the hardest hardcore disadvantage of Ableton Live: Not being able to transform a totally unmapped project to a fully midi mapped project in one shot, without hundreds of mouse clicks and headache. As I have a quite complex or better huge midi mapping setup, I created in the end an AutoHotkey automation which can start from a totally empty project file and ends in fully midi mapped project while me sitting in the kitchen and enjoying my coffee. Normally Ableton Live should allow me doing this, like exporting all midi mappings into an external text file and later re-importing those into other projects, even using multi-stage importing but without overwriting already mapped parameters. Ableton needs developers like Justin Frankel or Holger Zwar to get such features probably.

I'd love to see a preferences checkbox: "Import MIDI/QWERTY Mapping with Live Sets?"

Pitch Black wrote:I'd love to see a preferences checkbox: "Import MIDI/QWERTY Mapping with Live Sets?"

Yes, but imagine you have two live sets, A and B. A is the bigger one, let us say containing 100 midi mappings and B has the size of 70% of A but with 0 midi mappings, so 30% of A are missing in B. Now it should be possible even to import the fitting/matching midi mapping parameters from A to B.

ton wrote:

Pitch Black wrote:I'd love to see a preferences checkbox: "Import MIDI/QWERTY Mapping with Live Sets?"

Yes, but imagine you have two live sets, A and B. A is the bigger one, let us say containing 100 midi mappings and B has the size of 70% of A but with 0 midi mappings, so 30% of A are missing in B. Now it should be possible even to import the fitting/matching midi mapping parameters from A to B.

But why would A be missing 30% of its size if I imported it into B? B would grow to accommodate the size of A, would it not?

Pitch Black wrote:But why would A be missing 30% of its size if I imported it into B?

No, this should be only a fictive scenario, we do not import A fully into B, we import only its midi mappings to B, then Live should be able to check how similar the included tracks, devices, clip slots are and apply the midi mappings for each hit/match. Imagine it like a "regex search" of all midi mapped parameters of A for all components in B.

Another nice analogy would be how DR-008 handles importing of sample kits, you can import a whole new kit onto any other kit and it will fill only the empty slots/pitches. This kind of "algorithm" allows you to complete your end solution using partial solutions from various projects. But you never have to do the same work twice, you can just import it from a previously done work/mapping.

Of course it would be even better if Live could differentiate among different midi remote control ports. Now we can only have (16 * 128) = 2048 "remote control notes" and 2048 "remote control cc". Having multi-port remote control support could even allow using more complex setups.

Ah I get you, I was only referring to copying assignments attached to clips/tracks/scenes... not copying just the assignments themselves.

Pitch Black wrote:Ah I get you, I was only referring to copying assignments attached to clips/tracks/scenes... not copying just the assignments themselves.

Yeah, in technical systems orthogonality of anything is usually a good thing, then you can freely combine those orthogonal components. A good example would be the Unix philosophy of software development. You have many little tools, which do only one small and very limited thing. Then you can freely combine such small tools and nobody tells you how you have to use those, it depends only on your imagination. If developers try to define how systems/tools/sequencers should be used sooner than later some users will hit those limitations. The midi mapping system of Live is great in general, but somehow the whole world of automated mapping or mapping management was forgotten, you have to do all manually by using a pc mouse. But if I know exactly how many devices I have where and how I want to map those, why can not we do it all together in one shot, without this "manual work force".

You really are from the year 2032 aren't you?

ton wrote:Now we can only have (16 * 128) = 2048 "remote control notes" and 2048 "remote control cc".

To complete this listing, we can also use 16 pitchbend events, one pitchbend per midi channel. So all together there are 2048 + 2048 + 16 = 4112 different events possible per midi port. As Live supports up to six "external control systems" I am not sure if they are automatically recognized as orthogonal devices. What I mean do we have then all togetherevent possibilities for external midi mapping?

What if your audio tracks are grouped?