The hidden export features in Ableton

I’m pretty sure, you know that Ableton Live creates audio files in the project folder, but not everyone knows how to use this fact.

If you take a look at the project’s directory structure, you may find in the folder Sample/Processed more folders containing audio files.

The project folder structure.

The point I want to make is that can use this place as a kind of audio export, because you can copy every file and use it again in Ableton or load it into other audio applications.

Fortunately, the folder names are corresponding with the respective function in Ableton. If you freeze a track you will find new audio files in the freeze folder and so on.

And here are some things you can do by copying files from there:

• Time stretching/compression of audio files

  After warping an audio track, its tempo depends on the global song tempo. But Ableton is nondestructive, so a time stretching or compression is done on the fly, when you play your song. Maybe you have moved some warp markers, the software will treat them as local tempo changes. For the sake of clarity, the used original audio file is untouched and you will hear something different, if you play this track.

  As you see, there are some good reasons for exporting this audio and the standard export feature is for my taste too complicated.

  What you have to do is such simple. Select the track in arrangement view and choose consolidate from the context menu. The rendered file will stored in the Consolidate folder.

• Converting MIDI tracks into audio

  In case you have a MIDI track and you need an audio file, you have to freeze the track and the software will store the result in the Freeze folder.

• Cutting or joining audio files

  As expected does crop create an audio file in the Crop folder. If you apply consolidate (in the arrangement view) to more than one audio track, you will get one single audio file in the Consolidate folder.

I’m pretty sure there are much more use cases. Note, if you just working in the session view and you need a feature only offered in arrangement view, just copy the track and past it into a suitable track of the arrangement. My tip is, don’t move such files from the place, if you don’t know, how Ableton is using this file.

That’s all for today. I hope this helps. Best regards.

alexander

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Warping Multiple Tracks in Ableton

Sometimes I’m working on multi track projects with little timing issues. Of course Ableton Live offers warp marker editing in order to fix such problems. But today I was wondering, what can I do, when every track should be affected? I think, it is simple in case you know how. And that is my approach.

Two tracks with timing problem.

Here is a simple example. I have two tracks – a drum and a bass loop. Unfortunately there is a timing problem at beat 2.2. I think, the instruments are too late, so I like to move both instruments a bit forward.

Make sure, that all tracks have the same length. In case you have not done it yet, drop the tracks from the file browser into different channels of the arragement view or copy the tracks from the session view and past them into the arragenment view channels.

You must decide on which track you will working. The track becomes something like a master track. In my case, I will use the drum loop – looks much more simpler to me. Select the master track while clicking on the title bar of the track.

Click on the title bar of the master track.

After that press CMD + A in order to select all tracks.

After selecting you are in the multi track mode.

So, both tracks are selected (orange in my case). Don’t be irritated that working on the warp markers let the color disapear. You are still working on all tracks. Nevertheless, the clip view has still the typical cross stripes and the clip name is just a star.

Editing the warp marker effects all tracks.

Now you can edit on the warp markers and you will notice, that the other clip will change to. In that case I added three marks and move the inner one.

I hope, you can hear the difference. A simple approach, but it works fine me.

Best regards! alexander