Please Add the Ability to Preview Sets Before Loading Them

[Tranceophile]

Perhaps the most exasperating and time-consuming aspect of working with Live is that I must somehow try to keep track of which file contains which music. No matter how descriptive I try to be in naming my files, I inevitably find myself wasting minutes of precious creative time (and caffeine buzz) opening this set and that set, hoping the next one I load will be the one I was looking for. Surely I am not alone in experiencing frustration with being unable to hear what is in a set before I load it.

I therefore believe an extremely useful enhancement for a future Ableton release would go something like this: In the "Open Set" and "Open Recent Set" dialogs, the user can click on an icon next to the filename, resulting in a 10-second preview of what is contained in the corresponding file.

This of course raises two questions: (1) How did the preview come into being, and (2) which 10 seconds of the set are chosen? Which brings me to the other half of the enhancement:

While working on a set, the user can bring up the File menu and select "Generate Preview." This causes 10 seconds of music from the set to be recorded for use as described above. Specifically, the preview contains the first ten seconds of whatever would be heard if the user had pressed the Play button -- it could be the first 10 seconds of the arrangement, or of a selected loop region in the arrangement, or the currently-selected clips. This would give the user the flexibility to determine what is to appear in the preview, without unnecessarily complicating the process of selecting it.

As a software developer myself, I know that life is full of complications. For example, if there is an external instrument track, the preview creation algorithm would have to play and record in real time to capture the incoming audio data. And then there are considerations of the housekeeping that must be done, such as deleting preview files if the user chooses not to save the Live set. But even though the design and implementation would be nontrivial, I believe the payoff to both Ableton and the user could be worth it. As a customer, I for one would gladly purchase a new version of Ableton to obtain this functionality. Being able to identify my sets by their sounds rather than their names would be a major, major plus.

[Polvough]

Seconded. Sounds like it's not easy unless the generated preview is an diff?

[re:dream]

is there any DAW in existence which has this feature?

[pottering]

Note that you can unfold a Set in the Browser, unfold its tracks, and then preview Clips on those tracks.

I think it is limited to Clips in Session View.

So a workaround is to keep at least one Clip (representative of the Set) in Session View,

Another workaround is saving a Clip as an .alc file on the project folder, it can also be previewed, and has a small file size.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWc_S4q0-VQ

[DevPossum]

I've always wanted to be able to preview my Ableton projects before opening them, so I finally broke down and just built a tool that does this myself. You can try it here: https://www.liveprojectlauncher.com/