Ableton Forum

Let's say I've got a bunch of content in Live 12's browser and I've invested some time tagging lots of it. Then I get a new computer or have to migrate to a different machine for whatever reason and I move all my content that I tagged to the new machine that has a fresh install of Live. How does the tagging metadata associated with that content move to the new system? Is it embedded in the content files? That can't be it, right? Does Live 12 create a database somewhere with a hash identifier for every file it scans and the metadata lives in the database? That's gotta be it, right?

Ok, I just answered part of my question. Looking in /Users/"username"/Library/Application Support/Ableton/Live Database (on a Mac), this seems to be it. It's an SQL lite database that has all the info in Live's browser. But it's not clear to me how you would migrate that to a new system. Or let's say you had Live installed on two machines with some different tagged content on each and you wanted to merge that content and retain all the tags from each into the merged dataset. I don't see any mention of how you would do that.

Without being able to migrate, merge, and batch edit that metadata, this whole tagged browsing thing is crap. You are out of luck if you need to manage that metadata. People are tagging their data and they're going to lose that data and will realize they wasted their time because Ableton hates their customers.

Not only that, but Ableton have hidden the documentation on this subject. Click on "Read the Live manual..." in Live 12's Help menu. You are taken to a webpage with a list of topics in Live's new browser-based-documentation-only policy. It's not searchable and you can not download a Live 12 manual PDF like you could previously. This is another indicator that Ableton hates their customer base. In the crappy browser-based documentation that's supposed to replace the downloadable one, there is no section in the chapter-links for the new browser. If you go to 3. Live Concepts/3.1 The Browser there is a link "Working with the Browser" that takes you to the relevant section but they left it out of the main list, so you have to dig for it or find it by accident. Live 12 has been out for MONTHS. This is the type of gigantic, glaring error an 11 year old would notice and correct immediately, but it's apparently too much to ask from a hugely profitable software company. They hate us so why should they bother?

The answer to where the tags are stored is in the 3rd post in this thread.

The problem with syncing and/or merging tags between several computers (and even with P3S now) is the same as syncing/merging the (user) Library and Packs. I'm sure we are a lot wishing this could be easily done, but it's not a trivial thing to achieve.
After trying various options to achieve this with mixed results that basically made me slowly abandon this idea, I realized that I'm not using my laptop, my desktop and my P3S for the same thing (in Live's context here indeed) and that I actually didn't need to sync all this stuff. I know it's not a solution to your problem, but I feel like it's worth mentioning.

And if you need to migrate everything to e.g a new computer, just like with everything else, you just clone the stuff to your new drive and you're good to go.

Tags have been one of the most requested feature for a long time, so I guess Ableton sometimes loves their customers.

Also, a lot of info that's not necessarily part of the user guide is in the Knowledge Base

[jur] wrote: ↑

Tue May 28, 2024 1:59 pm

The answer to where the tags are stored is in the 3rd post in this thread.

fun tag fact - on this forum if you click the little "document" icon to the left of the author's name on each post it gives you a direct link for an anchor tag to that post. EG

viewtopic.php?p=1822329#p1822329




on the topic of the XMP files, these seem very portable and editable. They are text files in XML format, with file paths stored as relative - so if the parent folder is moved or copied to a new location the tags will come along. EG: A folder of 1000 kick drums, once tagged, can be zipped up, and moved to a different machine pretty easily.
If a person was a complete nutter they could even create a little 3rd party app to access these XML files and do some management on them

Angstrom wrote: ↑

Wed May 29, 2024 12:52 pm

fun tag fact - on this forum if you click the little "document" icon

I was actually reading stuff on your website a few hours ago, so you definitely taught me a few things today Steve

(that's most certainly the only button I never clicked on in this forum, that's crazy!)

[jur] wrote: ↑

Thu May 30, 2024 1:59 am

Angstrom wrote: ↑

Wed May 29, 2024 12:52 pm

fun tag fact - on this forum if you click the little "document" icon

I was actually reading stuff on your website a few hours ago, so you definitely taught me a few things today Steve

(that's most certainly the only button I never clicked on in this forum, that's crazy!)

Thanks! I should post some more tutorials and fewer depressing updates !