Ableton Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I didn't see anything and the manual wasn't much help, so here goes.

Say I have a number of songs on my hard drive that I want to use in a live situation. Thanks to Live's clip envelopes, I can make a lot of really cool modifications -- one clip can play a string passage looped with a volume envelope for a "gating" effect, another can have a shuffled drum feel with the offset envelope, etc. All of this is done in real-time by Live, using the same song file.

What I would like to do is have these different clips appear in Live's browser, so that I could drag them into my session view as needed.

The easiest solution would be to render/bounce all of these new clips to new files, but that's a real waste of hard drive space considering they all use the same sample, and having many 8-10 minute songs on the disk in uncompressed AIFF/WAV format eats up space quickly.

What would be ideal is if I could create a cool little modification, or one looped section, and save the Analysis File or clip file to reference the original sample so that it would appear in Live's Browser, without creating a new audio file on the hard disk.

I believe the clips are saved with the Live session, but I would rather not open up the session at a gig and have thousands of clips staring me in the face. Organizing that would be a nightmare!

This is my only concern that needs addressing before I can purchase Live. Is this possible? Any ideas?

Thanks!

I've been talking to various people about exactly this recently.

Can't seem to find a sensible way to achieve it. But it would be really useful...

I'm only running the demo, so I can't save default clip settings yet... but what happens if you copy the ASD file associated with an audio clip, and rename it?

I don't think it'll work, because Live's browser seems to display a list of audio files rather than a list of ASD files, but maybe it's worth a try...

It would really be nice if there were a way to do it, though, since it'd save gigs and gigs of hard drive space.

At the moment you cannot save multiple clip envelope defintions for the same file...

On OS X you might be able to do something funky like make links to the file, and then have live create different .asd files for each softlink/hardlink... but I know you cannot do this in XP at the moment.

I tried creating symbolic links and aliases of audio files to see if Live would load them, and neither worked.

Aliases don't even show up in the file browser, and symbolic links do show up but load as blank audio files (presumably since Live could find no actual audio data in the link file.)

And here I had really hoped that this would have worked... *sigh*

Maybe 4 will do this, would be WELL handy

yeah this is possible in MacOSX using links. but not symbolic.


ie. ln wavs_dir/original.wav new_wavs_dir/original.wav

copy the .asd file over to the new_wavs_dir/ and it should work. you can then modify one analysis withut affecting the other.

no XP fix for this tho. unless Cygwin will do it (i suspect not tho)