So now we need to talk about something very important that often gets overlooked until it becomes a problem which is managing our files. What we're dealing with is digital information. So, making sure that we're in control and aware of what's happening with the files is really, really important. So to begin with, I'm going to do what is referred to as a save as, I've been working on this track for a while now, so you can see I have a whole arrangement of it ready to go. And I want to be able to go back to the beginning if I want to but also save my place right here, which is referred to as a save as. So I'm going to go up to File, navigate down to Save Live Set As and I'm going to give it a new name. So, I'm going to just add the word Arrangement. And I'm going to make sure that it's in the right folder. So, I've saved the project folder to the desktop and I'm going to put it in here. So, what I'm going to have are two different live sets all living inside of the same project folder, hit Save, we should see this name reflected in the title bar as well. So one more thing we need to do is make sure that all of these audio files are collected and saved into the project folder. So, depending on where this audio came from if you recorded it into the session or if you pulled it in from your desktop or some other source, the audio might not live permanently inside of the project folder yet. So what we need to do is go up to File, navigate down to Collect All and Save and we're going to be given an option of which files do we want to Collect and Save in here, Files from elsewhere? I'm going to go ahead and say yes on that one because I did pull in audio from other places outside of Live, files from other projects, things from the user library, things from factory packs. So if it's just you opening these things on your computer, you don't need to bring in things that are from your user library because this already exists on your computer. But bringing in files that you pulled in from elsewhere or from other projects is something you do want to say yes to. I'm going to say OK and it jumps into action and all of the files get collected and saved into the project folder except you can see one here that didn't save, it's the breakbeat. So I pulled that in from a Dropbox folder and this is a really great opportunity to show you how to relink missing files because this can happen quite a bit depending on where you pulled stuff in from. What I want to do is go to the file manager, so if I go to File, Manage Files, Manage Project, you can see that it says two files used by this project are missing. So, I'm going to locate them. So this little magnifying glass is a hot swap button and it's going to bring me to a place inside of the folder where it says, is this what you meant [LAUGH] and more often than not, it's correct in that assumption. And in this case, it definitely is. If it's not or if there are no suggestions, you can go up to the search folder and you can just set the folder. So if you knew where this is and this lives on another hard drive, you just set this folder and say Go and it will automatically look through the place that you're dictating. In my case, I'm seeing the file right here. So I'm just going to double-click on it. And it's saying that it still has missing files, should Live try to resolve all the missing files based upon the location of this one that I've just replaced? I'm going to say yes, and now if I close the browser, you can see that the breakbeat is ready to go for me right there. Now that we've got this back into the project folder, I'm just going to collect and save one more time to make sure that I've got it all in there. It's not going to create redundant files, it'll just collect things that are currently not living inside the project folder. So what I'm going to do now is exit Live and open the project folder so we can see the file hierarchy and how it's all put together so we can always find and manipulate files as necessary. So here is the project folder, it's living right on my desktop, I'm just going to open this up and you can see that I've got a number of folders and two Live sets. So, here is the first version of my session and it ends in a .als file extension which stands for Ableton Live session. I've got a second version of this which was the save as that I just did which is the arrangement. I've got everything laid out in a linear timeline, and I also did a save then. So I can go back to either version of the set at any given time. I recommend doing a save as every time you sit down to really work on a session. So, you might have 3, 4, 20, 50 versions of this depending on how long you work on something. The Ableton Project Info is mostly just analysis files and you'll never need to go in there as well as the backup but this is nice, it is backing up and saving different versions of the session for you at different times. This is one of the more important folders to understand and this is where all of your samples live, meaning any piece of audio that lives inside of your session. So you can see there's an imported file and this is that chord progression that I pulled in. Things that have been processed. So anything that you've cropped which is what I did to the breakbeats, freeze tracks, which is what we did to the base track. And then also if you consolidated files, if you took multiple files and made them into one file, you're also going to find this here. And as you create these files, Ableton creates the folder so that they live inside of, so, you're not responsible for doing that. But what you are responsible for is understanding where they are once they've been created. Lastly, we have this recorded section and you can see that these are the two audio files that I recorded in with my microphone. So every time you see an AIFF file or a WAV file, it's going to be accompanied by another file with the exact same name with the file extension .asd and these are analysis files. This is how Ableton manages to warp audio. They're extremely small. They take up basically no space at all. And if you delete them, they will just repopulate your project folder again the next time you open it. So, for the most part you can just ignore these files. They're just there and it's the way that warping works. So that's where everything is. You can also create more folders. Let's say if you want to do multiple exports, it could just go in here, create a new folder, I'll call this Exports and as I'm saving, I just need to make sure that when I do that, I'm saving it to this file. And you can really clearly manage everything and keep track of where everything's living on your computer which leads me to my next topic is where are these files living on your computer or are they on an external drive? Do you have them backed up? So you can see that I've got this particular session living on my desktop, which is maybe not the best place for it to live permanently. But for now, this is fine,and eventually as you make more and more music, you might have several project folders. So picking a dedicated place for your Ableton sessions to live is a really important step to take and making sure that you're not saving a session inside of another session. You're going to save yourself a lot of frustration as you continue down this path and the more you produce, the more important file management becomes. So I like to back up all of my sessions onto a cloud drive. So either I'm using Google Drive or I'm using Dropbox. So a version of it lives on my computer and it also lives in the cloud and then when I'm all said and done with that something, I'll put in another copy to an external drive. For the most part, everything is managed and taken care of and I don't really run into any issues. So I really want to encourage you to create your own protocol and your own way of managing these files and making sure that you're in control of what's happening.
