Little Script for Mac to get a psuedo autosave on Live 8/9
Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 1:42 am
This may be useful to somebody!
Im still being driven insane with Live crashing while Im sound designing and losing all my vst settings. Which is a really disheartening experience. So I made a very simple applescript (using various sources from the web - people with actual "knowledge" ha.) for osx that presents you with a yes/no dialog every 5mins whether youd like to save your Live project. Click Yes and it simply uses the command+s hotkey and saves it (even if live is in the background).
You can change the time to anything you want - "delay 300" is the amount of time in seconds until it asks you again.
The script looks like this -
repeat
tell application "Ableton Live 8"
activate
delay 300
set Button_pressed to display dialog "Do you need to save your work?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2
if button returned of Button_pressed is "No" then
tell application "Ableton Live 8"
activate
delay 300
end tell
else
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Ableton Live" to keystroke "s" using command down
end tell
end if
end tell
end repeat
Now - obviously you dont need the Yes/No dialog part - but the reason you shouldnt let live autosave in the background is that Live 8 deletes the undo history when it saves. Which would be a nightmare if it did it at the wrong time without your knowledge. (if theyd ever fix this "Undo" situation it would be a major gift to everyone still on 8... very unlikely now with 9. Live's definitely able to restore the undo after a crash so.. I dunno - it seems well within their expertise)
So - not ideal, but the best we can do. At the very least, a nag screen to remind you to save your work.
On 1st run itll ask you where Live is kept.
http://www.mediafire.com/?8w2k8j899av67dw
Hope somebody gets some use out of it! No guarantees it will work, just experiment and see if it works.
An ideal script would be able to select "save a copy" instead and automatically put in a v1.1 after your current file name. But "save a copy" doesnt have a hotkey.... :/ And automator doesnt seem to do timebased repeated actions.
Im still being driven insane with Live crashing while Im sound designing and losing all my vst settings. Which is a really disheartening experience. So I made a very simple applescript (using various sources from the web - people with actual "knowledge" ha.) for osx that presents you with a yes/no dialog every 5mins whether youd like to save your Live project. Click Yes and it simply uses the command+s hotkey and saves it (even if live is in the background).
You can change the time to anything you want - "delay 300" is the amount of time in seconds until it asks you again.
The script looks like this -
repeat
tell application "Ableton Live 8"
activate
delay 300
set Button_pressed to display dialog "Do you need to save your work?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2
if button returned of Button_pressed is "No" then
tell application "Ableton Live 8"
activate
delay 300
end tell
else
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Ableton Live" to keystroke "s" using command down
end tell
end if
end tell
end repeat
Now - obviously you dont need the Yes/No dialog part - but the reason you shouldnt let live autosave in the background is that Live 8 deletes the undo history when it saves. Which would be a nightmare if it did it at the wrong time without your knowledge. (if theyd ever fix this "Undo" situation it would be a major gift to everyone still on 8... very unlikely now with 9. Live's definitely able to restore the undo after a crash so.. I dunno - it seems well within their expertise)
So - not ideal, but the best we can do. At the very least, a nag screen to remind you to save your work.
On 1st run itll ask you where Live is kept.
http://www.mediafire.com/?8w2k8j899av67dw
Hope somebody gets some use out of it! No guarantees it will work, just experiment and see if it works.
An ideal script would be able to select "save a copy" instead and automatically put in a v1.1 after your current file name. But "save a copy" doesnt have a hotkey.... :/ And automator doesnt seem to do timebased repeated actions.