Ableton Forum

Hi, all: I've nearly maxed out my computer's hard drive (500GB SSD, MacBook Pro late 2014, FWIW), and am thinking I could move part of my samples and/or Ableton Library to my SSD card (basically an external drive).

Can you point me to advice/articles/etc. on the best way to do this? I'm not sure which parts to move, and how to "tell" Ableton Live to look in the usual place (my hard drive) and this secondary place (the external drive) for sounds.

If you need any more info about my setup to answer this question, please let me know.

And thanks in advance, everyone, for your suggestions!

what samples do you have? if you have a large sample library, i would suggest moving either the whole Ableton library, or some or all of your other sample libraries, keeping whichever you use most on the internal drive...

There's a very general guideline in the knowledge base: Using multiple hard drives.

You can move all Live Packs (other than the Core Library) and your User Library through the Library Preferences as shown in the "2nd drive - samples and libraries" section of that document.

Targets must be existing folders, Packs- and User Library may not be the same folder but may be subfolders of the same parent (I use this for my backup strategy).

Samples from other sources live below the samples folder of my User Library, so they're indexed automatically, no need to blow up Places.

Sample- and preset libraries from plugin instruments (i.e. VSTi and such) are a whole different can of worms, if you're lucky, you may find instructions in the installation packages.

Great info, thank you!