Ableton Forum

Hi there,

I often struggling to manage versions/edits of the tracks I'm working on. Sometimes I duplicate the whole part in the timeline so I can try a new edit. Sometime I'm doing a save as.
Very often I'd like to listen to what I have done elsewhere so I'm exporting temporary audio files (called bounce or render). I think I would love to have the ability to listen to a preview of the .als file when pressing on the spacebar in the finder or live browser, so I wouldn't need to open it to check what's inside.

So, I find it difficult to keep organized. It is really important espcially if you are working on scores for movies to be able to keep a good trace of what you are exporting and keep the ability to get back to it, as sometimes movie editors/directors do some recuts of what you are giving.

What I'm doing right now is that after exporting an audio mix, I'm doing a "Save a copy" with same name. So I can still working on the track and get back to the version exported if needed.

Does it make sense for you? what are your methods?

I have opened a suggestion in the center code to make what I do manually quicker, something similar exists in reaper. https://ableton.centercode.com/project/ ... d8c08fbb78

What would help me a lot (and I guess many others) is being able to open several sessions as tabs... I do save copies along the way and being able to have some open in parallel would generally be what I would find efficient to go back and forth and quickly listen to other edits or even sections but as separate files.

Previewing of various .als from the browser without having to render them would be quite something indeed. Or some sort of open-as-read-only as secondary tabs, could maybe make it less heavy on the system.. In any case yes, the way it is now is lacking in the 'comparing sessions department.'

stumbled across this video this morning--doesn't really help with my linear workflow, but sounds like there might be some tips that could help others: https://youtu.be/u83XcTqAnls?si=LeRhcD5Omxe4MbqY

I've been doing this since forever already It is useful but not 'sufficient' for many situations.

I guess efficient version management is still an unsolved issue in digital creative production, be it visually or musically. (Update: I have to take that sentence back. I found Perforce.)

Usually, I duplicate tracks within a set or I save a copy of the session/set with a timestamp at the beginning of the filename within the project folder.

In software development they use versioning tools like GitHub, which seems to work well, even though it feels sometimes confusing for me.

I think it would be cool, if we could select areas within clips, tracks or the whole project and create a snapshot (maybe with a title). So we could choose one of them, if we want to return to it.