Ableton Forum

So frustrating, but I guess I should say that ultimately yes - I burned myself. One wrong click wiped out about an hour of work, but this again shows me how I wish Live managed it's content a little better/more thoroughly.

Long story short:

Made a killer drum kit in Impulse from chopping up a loop. Had a lot of fun experimenting and learning, including some slickness (for me) - made the preliminary kit, then twisted/processed/effected the hits to all hell. Next I routed the midi track to a new audio track and recorded the hits to audio...then made a new Impulse and put the new recorded hits in it, so that the Impulse itself was "fresh" with all default settings.

I was pretty proud of myslef!

After saving the kit, I decided to start a new project. Upon closing, Live asked if I wanted to save the recorded audio in its temp folder; I chose NO because I didn't *think* I needed or wanted them anymore - I'd saved my new kit and was good to go.

You know what happened next - I didn't even think of how Impulse doesn't hold any sounds, just markers to where the sounds are. All that work lost! Yes it was my fault, but I wish Impulse would save kits like Battery, with an accompanying folder holding the actual samples. That way this would never happen...

Rant off. Still sad.

I've lost some work in the past in a similar way.

Now i make copies of things and save them,re-open them and test'em before being "done"..

4ace wrote:I've lost some work in the past in a similar way.

Now i make copies of things and save them,re-open them and test'em before being "done"..

+1
Learning the hard way Sucks!!!

no - that shouldnt happen - you should post this in the wishlist forum

that is not really an acceptable way for it to be handled - if you have used samples and saved them like that Live should keep track of this and not send you such a misleading dialog - I probably would forget and do the same even now

if not saving with the kit, then automatically adding to the library as soon as you create the impulse preset - at very least a dialog asking if you want to ad the samples to the library

dont blame yourself for that, that is a shortcoming of Live that should be fixed

Im pretty sure if you are on a mac the temp files could be found in the trash... and just restored from there... wouldn't know about Windoze though.

Anyhoo, that suks man!

COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE!!!!!!


Go through ALL your sets and do this right now. Then you can delete all those temporary recordings and not worry about a thing.
If you still are working on creating a library, sweet. Just collect all and save on your sets and you probably won't lose any more stuff.

the_planet wrote:COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE!!!!!!


Go through ALL your sets and do this right now. Then you can delete all those temporary recordings and not worry about a thing.
If you still are working on creating a library, sweet. Just collect all and save on your sets and you probably won't lose any more stuff.

+1

Was moving my entire sample and track folders over the weekend and decided to go through roughly 20 newer projects doing this just to make sure that Live would find all the samples afterwards.

Collect all and save won't fix it.

I did a mic recording, imported parts into impulse, simpler and sampler. I saved the impulse, simpler and sampler presets and saved 'live clips' of them as well as the original clip recording. I then did a 'collect all and save' on the project.

All the plug ins worked until I deleted the project directory (from the Live browser), Impulse had them greyed out and si/ampler said they were offline. The 'collected all and save' folder shouldn't have to follow its live clips and saved presets, that ain't right.

Tone Deft wrote:Collect all and save won't fix it.

I did a mic recording, imported parts into impulse, simpler and sampler. I saved the impulse, simpler and sampler presets and saved 'live clips' of them as well as the original clip recording. I then did a 'collect all and save' on the project.

All the plug ins worked until I deleted the project directory (from the Live browser), Impulse had them greyed out and si/ampler said they were offline. The 'collected all and save' folder shouldn't have to follow its live clips and saved presets, that ain't right.

Wha?? Of course you lost it all. You deleted the project directory. That's where everything is "collected and saved." AFAIK, collect all and save saves all the audio recordings, samples, and other clips in the project directory so they are consolidated in one spot. Hasn't failed me yet.
The OP was talking about the temporary recordings folder, not the project folder.

Or am I totally not understanding what's going on here?

the_planet wrote:

Tone Deft wrote:Collect all and save won't fix it.

I did a mic recording, imported parts into impulse, simpler and sampler. I saved the impulse, simpler and sampler presets and saved 'live clips' of them as well as the original clip recording. I then did a 'collect all and save' on the project.

All the plug ins worked until I deleted the project directory (from the Live browser), Impulse had them greyed out and si/ampler said they were offline. The 'collected all and save' folder shouldn't have to follow its live clips and saved presets, that ain't right.

Wha?? Of course you lost it all. You deleted the project directory. That's where everything is "collected and saved." AFAIK, collect all and save saves all the audio recordings, samples, and other clips in the project directory so they are consolidated in one spot. Hasn't failed me yet.
The OP was talking about the temporary recordings folder, not the project folder.

Or am I totally not understanding what's going on here?

I didn't quite get it at first, that's why I tried it.

Record some sounds into a mic, now you have new material that you know isn't saved anywhere. With the OP this material was tweaked sounds created in a new Live set.

Put those sounds into an Impulse, a Simpler and a Sampler.

On the instruments, hit the little floppy disk icon, this saves them as presets in your library. These presets now show up under the instruments in Live's browser.

ALSO, drag and drop those instruments outside the Live library, this saves them as Live clips.

ALSO save the original sample outside the Library (just to see if having it around has an effect.)

Do a Collect All and Save. You can play the instruments and all that.

Close the set. Delete the Project. The presets and the Live Clips no longer play any sounds because the sounds are gone. I imagine the same would happen if you were to move the project.


What the OP did was sit down, make some new drum sounds, tweak them, put them into an Impulse and made his own tasty new drum kit. He saved off this new preset but didn't save the audio he pulled the drum hits from. Now his preset doesn't work.

What's also booty about this is what if he DID save his sample. If he wanted to send me the new Impulse drum kit he'd have to include the f-ing project folder too!!

One thing I didn't look into was using the File Manager to export the project's samples to the library (it was 2am when I tried this last night.) But still, that's booty because again, if he wanted to send me the new instrument I don't have his library so it wouldn't work.

I guess it comes down to workflow, knowing Live in and out, working with it.

Yup... when making Live clips the associated samples do not get saved to someplace in the library. I think this should be an automatic process.

I mean most likely I am making a clip because I don't want to have to hold on to the whole project right?

the_planet wrote:COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE
COLLECT ALL AND SAVE!!!!!!

AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!

Live needs SERIOUS help with its file management. not only because audio gets lost when you don't Collect All and Save, but because there are nested/nested/nested/nested/AudioFiles and Caches, and temp folders all over the dam place.

[quote="jasper"] AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!
AND EVERY SONG FILE WILL CONTAIN DUPLICATES OF AUDIO FILES!!!

Live needs SERIOUS help with its file management. not only because audio gets lost when you don't Collect All and Save, but because there are nested/nested/nested/nested/AudioFiles and Caches, and temp folders all over the dam place. [/quote]
DISK SPACE IS CHEAP
DISK SPACE IS CHEAP
DISK SPACE IS CHEAP

I'd rather use more disk space with redundant files I can tweak without affecting others than have to be careful about a new project affecting a good track I did a year ago.

But none of this addresses the problem the OP brought up.

i may be totally mistaken here, but i think when you create a preset, you can right-click the preset in the browser and "manage files" ...
if that works ??? then that could be the easiest solution.
you wouldn't have to mess with your project or it's temp folder.

as far as sharing is concerned ... yes that is its own ball

No I think the file management has a way to go

at the moment it is completely dependent on saving a project file

I'm not so bothered about that as it tends to be one of the first things I do

but I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect that if you save a preset that the sample files should be saved too

at the very least a different warning that makes all this clear

I can understand it would get quite messy if there was a sounds folder for every single saved preset, but there is bound to be some solution

I dont think presets should be linked to projects at all

but equally, if you want to share the presets then there needs to be an easy way of finding the samples - so just putting them in a huge samples folder in the Library is not ideal either

I'm sure Hoffman2k has some words to say on all this - saving presets is his main preoccupation!