Ableton Live Tutorials: Saving and Exporting

[Music] hi I'm Lee Mirman and we're gonna look at saving and exporting your work in Ableton Live so I'm at a stage where I've got an arrangement set up I've got my mixer I like it basically ready to take this song and give it to the world so I can save my project first before I export it and the first thing I need to do in terms of saving my project is decide how much data I want to save with this actual project when I save it so if I go to save live set and I go to my desktop give this a name let's say techno Oh 1 if I hit save as it is and I go to the location of that folder which is my desktop and open that up what's happened is Ableton Live has saved a dot a LS file that contains all of my sequencing information all the details of the files I've used and so on across the whole project what it hasn't actually done is localized the information that I've used so the audio files i've used to create my song they are technically still in the place i found them so they could have been on an external USB Drive and i dragged it into Ableton Live and just hitting save live set just saves the reference to the location of that file so when I open this up again without my USB Drive plugged in it won't find it because it'll be on a device that's not connected anymore so it's a good habit in terms of making sure your projects will open as expected each time you open them up we actually want to collect all and save so we go to collect all and save and when then we need to choose from this menu what files and from where we're going to save so we've got files from elsewhere which is the external location so that USB Drive would be one of those or it could be from your desktop something you download folder where you download is something you decide to use it in a song then we have files from other projects sometimes people cannibalize one project and bring new bits in from an old song and put it into a new song if you choose to not collect all and save that it relies on that other project still having to be saved on your drive too because it contains the files that's in your project files from the user library are files that you saved within there itself into the user library location just on the left and the browser here and then finally we have files for factory packs as well battery packs are the packs that we install just cancel that form in it into our live library and they can be from Ableton themselves or from external vendors as well if you want to make sure that when you pass a project to someone else that it has absolutely everything that's needed to play that project back it's worth checking that box too however if that song you've saved has like an incredibly multi sample to brass instrument in there and it's gigabytes and gigabytes in size it will collect all that data and put it inside so it may be more advisable that you tell the person you're passing this project to to make sure they've installed that pack and it saves you the bother of having this huge project so let's just go back to collect all and safe so I'm going to check everything just in case wherever I've got these files from asides from factory packs and press okay so remember the difference is if you just save the live set you are saving all your sequencing information but not the actual files that been brought into the project to make that that sequence whereas if you collect all and save you are gathering all that external information to make sure it's located in the same place as that dot ALS file which means you grab that one folder knowing that project will open up on other computers and you can transfer things around so next we need to look at export in our track now the first kind of export you want to do is a stereo export to give that to another person pass it around to other people or potentially put it online so we'll look at that first now an arrangement view the first thing we need to do is actually select the portion of our arrangement that we want to export now it's quite obvious we want to export the full song it's laid out the way that we want it but we do need to think about certain aspects the beginning will literally be bar one beat one that's the way there's a sequenced but the ending is slightly different because even though I've sequin different audio clips and MIDI clips up until bar 65 that actually affects their on those tracks and they have decays and delays that take a little while to fade out so first I need to figure out where those sounds stop completely so I'm just going to play the last couple of bars before the end of the track and then watch the cursor until I can't hear the actual fades in decays at the end [Music] okay just after bar 69 is where I can hear that the sound has disappeared so what I want to do let's say bar 70 want to be safe is I want to highlight from that position all the way to the beginning so I've highlighted the whole export area so I'm just going to click and drag and export that section there okay so if i zoom out again we've accounted for the that sounds that happen afterwards and the effects and so on and we're ready to export one last note Ashley before you export a track to make sure that you're aware of is make sure that your levels are okay so if we look at the session view so we can see a more mixer like layout we have our master track here and what we can do is make sure that it doesn't actually peek at the output before we export it so if I press play I can see that my song isn't exceeding the master level of the master track it's very important not to do that to avoid distortion so I'm ready to export now so let's just go back to arrangement view so we're seeing what it is you're exporting and go to file export audio video so the first thing we have in this selection box is what would we go in to actually render out what audio file we're going to create our or what we source we're going to use for our audio file so this instance we're going to go for our stereo export so the sound we're hearing through our master track is what we want to hear in our final file so we're going to choose master track as that option however you may have different needs for this project after you've finished it so all individual tracks will literally export every single track individually as a new audio file that can't then can be dragged into someone else's sequencing system or their door now that means that you could take all the individual sounds from your song and someone with a completely different sequencing system can drag those files in and therefore take your work and take it to another stage we work it remix it and so on now another thing you might want to do is create what we call stems out of your projects now stems are like a grouping system where you decide no matter how many parts are in your song what can they be best group does so typical stems would be a drum stem a bass stem melody stem and a vocal stem if that's the nature of your track so you categorize all these into different sections in order to do that you choose select choose selected tracks only and you'd make sure that within your project you pre-selected the relevant tracks that you want to make these exports from and that will then create rendered stems from your project so let's go back to where we were we want to do a master export something that I always check myself before I go is have a look at the render start make sure it is bar one beat one and so on and then make sure that that render length is marrying up to what I see of my highlighted section so it says it's a seventy bar long sequence that I'm going to export and then looking at my highlighted area that seems about right so it just catches me accidentally not highly in highlighting everything that I need to so the next thing we have it's grayed out at the moment is the include return and master effects section now if I'm doing selected tracks so trying to create my stems that's actually enabled and what it means is if the tracks that I'm gonna make stems from have sends going off to the return track so reverbs and delays and so on or if I also have some processing on my master track so I might have some mastering processing going on there that will be included in the rendering process so if you want your stems to sound like they do from within the mix even though they've been separated out that's worth checking off so let's go back to master again render as a loop is good for when you're making short exports out of a project let's say you've you've generated a short idea and you like the way it sounds once it loops round so for instance you might have a drum beat that you're making and you've put a big reverb on it when bar one beat one happens on that drum beat is not until the kick drum goes to the reverb that the reverb reacts and creates that big sound now if you played that bar more than once the beginning of the second bar would sound different than the beginning of the first bar because by the time the second bar starts the reverb Zahl ready had a chance to create that whole roomie aspect so render as loop accounts for that and actually exports twice the length of what you're exporting and export also edits just the last half of it so it sounds more like it's been running for a while it's very good for things like ambient effects when you're doing short ideas convert to mono literally just folds the stereo image and pans it down the middle so you only hear the mono aspects of the mix normalize scans the highest possible volume of your mix and make sure that it's turned up enough to be at the highest possible volume with the file that you make so that's good for maximizing your your levels as they come out of the mix creating analysis file will create a dot a SD file which means that basically if you take the thing you've exported and drag it into Ableton Live it will be perfectly warped and sit on the grid sample rate is an audio setting that you can modify based on your preferences or your needs but as a standard forty four point one kilohertz is the best option to go for encode PCM basically allows you to export a lossless audio format so in this case we've got AF files and wha files and then we have a compressed but still lossless format which is flack as well so as a preference I go for while i F is perfectly acceptable as well in order for you to then pass that on to another person bit-depth as a standard we tend to export a final version is either 24-bit or 16-bit pending again on where it's ending up as a end location and then did the ring is quite advanced but it basically gets around a couple of the technical issues of when we're going from one bit depth type within our project and turning it into a file that has a different bit depth as well so for now we'll just leave that as no dither if we want to create an mp3 so it's easy to share this on different platforms we can enable the mp3 option there and then if we've signed up to the SoundCloud in preferences we can upload directly from Ableton Live to SoundCloud from this environment as well cutting out the process of putting that up yourself finally if you actually have video within your Ableton Live arrangement you can enable or this bots will be enabled so you can then choose what video format your exporters obviously for now that's not relevant to us and once you hit export you then choose the location that you want to save this as so I'm just going to make sure this is named as something appropriate so final version and then click Save and then it will render that out as a project and then you have your final version of your mix available as a separate audio file so to recap what we've been looking up is the different saving options we have so either to save as just a dot a LS file or to make sure we collect all and save to pull all those external files within our project folder which makes it easier to pass it along to other people for compatibility we've also looked at exporting how we highlight the area accounting for any delay tales or anything that happens after our sequenced events and we've looked at the various ways we can export going from a stereo file that we exports through to doing separate exports as stems or as a complete project to separate audio files you

Channel: MusicTech

Views: 30,443

Keywords: MusicTech Magazine, ableton live 10 tutorial, collect all and save, ableton tutorial, export, how to, bounce to disk ableton, ableton live tutorial, ableton live, live 10, ableton live 10, bounce, MusicTech, how to use ableton, consolidate, learn music ableton, learn music production Ableton, ableton live lessons, Music Production, file management, ableton course

Id: YFK_VnzKDNs

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020