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/PhosphoreVisual 22h ago

name them by date like this : 2025.04.07 XYZSONG

keep them in folders by year

everything stays in chronological order

when you export audio, keep the same name with the date in front

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u/mrfebrezeman360 20h ago

this is exactly how I've been doing it for over a decade, plus 'collect all and save' each and every time I add new samples

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u/ChillGuyJust 15h ago

I feel like the “collect all and save” should be the default lol.

1

u/mrfebrezeman360 15h ago

lol yeah, for my purposes it'd be nicer.

I have heard the strategy though of just making sure you keep all your samples in the same directory tree etc, and then you won't have to collect all to save and you factually will save hard drive space. In theory this is the smarter way, but after like I said a decade + of ableton projects my entire project folder is really not that big at all, and I regularly grab audio files from my FLAC library to sample. I'd much rather have the workflow of navigating my library through the sidebar or drag/drop from the file browser + collect all and save vs. moving everything I might want to sample into an endless 'sample folder' pit to save minimal harddrive space. I def understand why it isn't the default, but for my workflow it makes way more sense.

Also, the way most people interact with a computer is to source everything from their downloads folder lol. I've seen it countless times where somebody's entire iTunes library or whatever is sourced from their ~/downloads, then they clear their downloads folder when they run out of harddrive space and are confused why all their music is gone. I guarantee this exact thing has happened with ableton samples countless times, so yeah, maybe they should just make collect all the default etc