Ableton Forum

Need some help, just started a course today on music production using Ableton Live 10 and installed the 30 day trial and I can't get anything to add to the arrangement view. In the course, the instructor just clicks and drags an instrument/sound from the browser and it displays a waveform and gets added to the arrangement view. Whenever I try this, I get nothing. No waveform, nothing changed on the arrangement view, when I click play there is no sound at all. Hoping someone might have some idea as to what's going on. I've restarted the application, and restarted my PC, and no luck. Tried googling but no results for my particular issue, just a lot of results about bringing a clip from session view to arrangement view. I'm hesitant to reinstall because i'm using the trial at the moment, and don't want to lose the trial license. Hoping this is just user error. Thanks!

Edit: When I drag a sound out to the arrangement view in a track, the track name does change to the name of the sound I used. Not sure if that's relevant or not.

To troubleshoot, probably drag the sample to a different player - say VLC maybe and check if you first have audio coming out of your system. If you do, then check preferences of Ableton and check if it's configured correctly to your audio interface (or onboard soundcard).

JesterXL7 wrote:In the course, the instructor just clicks and drags an instrument/sound from the browser and it displays a waveform and gets added to the arrangement view. Whenever I try this, I get nothing. No waveform, nothing changed on the arrangement view

An instrument and an audio file are two completely different things and, therefore, the result of dragging one or the other into a project will be very different.

An instrument will not give you a waveform. It will give you a MIDI instrument on a MIDI track. You can then play this instrument with MIDI clips on the same track or with some type of external controller sending MIDI messages to this instrument.

An audio file will contain audio and will appear as an audio waveform when you drag it into an audio track. Of course, not all audio files may be compatible with Live.

JesterXL7 wrote:When I drag a sound out to the arrangement view in a track, the track name does change to the name of the sound I used. Not sure if that's relevant or not.

This sound like you are dragging an instrument into Live and not an audio file (read my comments above). If you are indeed dragging an audio file, what format is it?