From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

File management - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

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File management

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- [Instructor] File management is critical to working with audio applications. Let's look at two of Live's tools that help with this important issue. So I've got the File Management project open, and if you look down at the bottom here in the status bar, you'll see that we have this message, "Media files are missing." And if you look at this KikOneShot simpler preset, you'll notice that the sample is not available. And if you look at the clips here in Session View, you'll notice they're all grayed out. So we're missing several files. Now, to start the process of re-linking these, all we need to do is double-click on the status bar. That will open up the Missing Media Files dialog over here on the right. And now we can choose where we want to search. We can search in the library. We can search in this project. If you want, you can narrow the search by selecting a folder and telling it to search there. And I've done that. Let me show you how you do that. So you click the Set Folder button and then just navigate your computer, choose the folder where you think the files are at, and click the Open button, and then enable this Yes button to make sure that it's going to look there. Once you're ready to go, you just click the Go button to start the search. So it took just a second there because I had narrowed the search, and we see that it's found and relinked the Base Loop option. If you look down here in the Drum Rack, it's linked the sample there that we needed to be able to play anything that is associated with this key on the Drum Rack. And it's also found two candidates for this Dirty Roads audio file and four for this Drum Loop. So if I want to relink those, I can click on the question mark, and that will show me the options that are available over here in the browser. And all we have to do is double-click one of those to assign it. Now when I do that, it's asking, "The location of this sample might also have the other samples that you're looking for. Do you want us to relink those if they're there?" I'm going to say No this time just to show you that we can also search for these. So I'll double-click to close that one, and I'm going to click on the question mark of this one. And we get the four options that we have. So I'll just choose one, double-click it, and now I can close Hot Swap Mode. And it's found all four of these files. So to complete this process, all I have to do is click Save, and it will relink these loops and clips and OneShot files to their current location. So I'll click Save. It says that it was saved successfully, and we can close this Missing Media Files dialog. Now if I save the project and open this later, if the other folders where all these files sit are available, then we won't have any problems. But there's one other tool that you should run, and that is Collect All and Save. So let's go to the File menu. Let's choose Collect All and Save. And now we need to tell it where we want it to look for the files. So files from elsewhere? Well, absolutely in this case, because most of the files here are sitting in another folder. So files from other projects, files from the user library, and then files from factory packs. So you need to think through this process because there are some presets that you may have in your Live set, and those presets may contain a number of audio files. For example, a grand piano sample is likely to have multiple samples for each key on the piano. And so that preset, if we save those files into this project, it could easily double the size of the project. So I'm going to deselect files from factory packs and files from user library in this case. And I'm going to click OK. So it took just a second, and now we can go down here and click on the current project folder. Notice that there's a Samples folder in our project here. You can click on that. There's a imported sub-folder. And when I click on that, now the four files that we needed are saved into our project. So there's nothing more annoying than missing files and broken links. So make sure you use the Collect All and Save functions so your projects include all of the necessary audio files and samples.

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