ABOUT COLLABORATING

The next topic I’m going to spend a few days writing about is collaboration. In particular, we’re going to look at some of the thorny technical issues that come up when moving a Set back and forth between multiple machines, and having people both make changes to Sets on their own, which then need to […]

COLLABORATING: FREEZE!

To easily share Sets between two different computers, both computers must have the same plug-ins installed (or rather, all of the plug-ins used in the Set being shared). When the necessary plug-ins aren’t available on both machines, the common workaround is to use Track Freeze. First, a bit about freezing tracks, then we’ll talk about […]

COLLABORATING: ANTI-FREEZE

While Freeze is a pretty great technology, expecting that it will solve all of your collaboration woes will lead to disappointment. My experience is that as Sets get large and complex, it gets easy to accidentally miss a track that needs to be frozen before you hand it off. A few thoughts to help improve […]

COLLABORATING: THE COMMITMENT ESCAPE HATCH

Some of this stuff about workflow and committing to ideas really isn’t limited to collaboration… it applies just as much when you’re working on your own. But here we are. So… Sometimes you want to commit to an idea by freezing and flattening, but you still want to leave yourself the option of going back […]

COLLABORATING: ABLETON INSTRUMENT AGGRO

If you have the Live Suite, or any of Ableton’s add-on instruments (or the Corpus effect), you have to be extra careful if you’re transferring a Set to a user that doesn’t have the same instruments. The issue is this: any set containing unauthorized instruments will be opened by Live in Demo mode – which […]

COLLABORATING: COLLECTING ALL

This tip might be a real snoozer for some of you more advanced users, but it’s one of those things that all sorts of folks aren’t completely clear on, so here goes… Live lets you drag in samples from all over your hard drive. Loops, drum hits, field recordings, whatever. When transferring a Set to […]

COLLABORATING: (NOT REALLY) LOST AND FOUND

When you open a Set and see the dreaded words “Sample Offline” where a clip’s waveform display should be, it’s time to get the File Manager involved. There are all sorts of scenarios we could discuss here, but here’s a quick and easy tip. Sometimes you know that all files were collected into the Project […]