Ableton Forum

I am having trouble with merging 3 sessions of Live.

I have composed music for a dance concert using Live in Arrange mode, and need to "stitch" together 3 different Live sessions into one. I make a Master session, and when I copy tracks from one of the sessions to paste into it, I lose all markers, Master Tempo changes--in fact, I lose ALL automation. This is extremely frustrating. These are very complex arrangements with hundreds of envelopes and a lot of tempo changes. I don't remember having this problem in Live 4 or 5.

Using Consolidate or Freeze to make the automation permanent before I copy and paste the tracks is not an option, since I need access to all parameters of the clips in each session so I can interact with the dancers as they perform. In any case, if I froxe tracks I would mess up my Tempo changes.

This is Live 6 on a 1.25GHz Mac G4 powerbook running OSX 10.4.7

Can you help?

dude, i've been working half mast at work, trying to figure out your issue. just thought i'd tell you that

.... none of them very satisfactory

1) Make up a "connecting" piece of music to play on CD or iPod while I Quit one Live session and Open the next - but that means dancers have to re-choreograph

2) Freeze tracks on one of the less complex sessions, copy the freezed tracks into the Master session, then hope the dancers don't change their timing

3) Postpone the show for a week so I can re-mix all the songs (NOT gonna happen!)

I have emailed Ableton too, but dress rehearsal is tonight, and I didn't have this problem with earlier Live versions. So I was caought unawares here, and I have to go forward.

I worry that Ableton may have finally put in too many features, Live is starting to get sluggish and buggy, which it NEVER was before.

I'd have to agree on the sluggishness, the interface and saving crawl when you have lots of clips or lots of automation.

I don't know of a way for the master tempo automation, but you should be able to create a master set, then drag in the .als file into arrangement view. So for example if you had three projects all with one track (I'm sure there's more) you would create a master with three tracks and then drag the saved projects in, one to each track. I needed to do what you're describing and remember this working.

So I confirmed that the above will work for all automation specific to the tracks themselves, but the master tempo changes don't come across using this method either.