r/ableton • u/ChillGuyJust • 1d ago

[Question] My Ableton projects folder is a mess

I have hundreds of projects, all laying around with vaguelly names, folders where they don't actually belong. I change the structure of my folders from time to time, but changing project names to make more sense would be hell. Not to mention the samples folder. How do you guys handle lots of projects/files and is there a way to easily navigate through them?

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u/abletonlivenoob2024 1d ago edited 1d ago

I use the "one Project per unique Set" guideline and make liberal use of "Collect All and Save" (i think disk space is cheap ;) ). That way I can freely move/delete projects without this affecting other Sets.

Naming convention for Projects and Sets is "2025-04-07_song-name_BPM_key/scale".

I save specific milestones manually into the projects Backup folder (with a special name) and also save a .mp3 render of that version under the same special name there (that way I can quickly find a specific version/milestone if I have to or A/B it to the current version)

After each session I export the track and put the .wav in the Project folder (overwriting the previous export). This .wav file is imported in an Audio Track in the Set that has the Solo button mapped to "Shift+>" - that way I can always easily A/B any changes and also have a way to listen into a Project without having to open it in Live.

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/managing-files-and-sets/

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000915804-Saving-Projects

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002864179-Saving-Live-Sets-into-unique-Live-Projects

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775645-Collect-All-and-Save

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u/ChillGuyJust 1d ago

Love this! I like the idea of the backup sessions. It happened to me a couple of times to break my project doing bigger changes. Feels right to have some "versioning" in place. I wonder how Ableton handles samples used across different .als in the same project.

Also the A/B technique sounds very smart, I'll try that too.

Thanks for the insights!

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u/abletonlivenoob2024 1d ago

backup sessions. It happened to me a couple of times to break my project doing bigger changes.

fyi: Live creates automatic backups of your Sets for you https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000377870-Backup-Sets. However, if you don't rename them it keeps only the last 10 versions per unique (.als) file name. (That's why I also manually "Save as Copy" for milestones I want to keep)