A lot of the preparation for my upcoming Austin gig is happening remotely, so there’s a lot of sending files back and forth. In particular, we’re sending Live projects containing audio loops. Sometimes these loops are short and homemade, and sometimes they are loops taken from entire songs.
Unfortunately, this remote collaboration sometimes has to make use of less than ideal internet connections so its important to get the projects down to the minimum size possible. The trick here is to crop the songs so you’re sending only the audio needed for the loops and save the set into a new project.
First, I’ll use Save As… to make a copy of the set I’m working on. I’ll save it to the desktop or some new location so a new project folder gets created.
Next, I’ll go through and delete any clip that doesn’t need to get sent. Once I’m down to the bare minimum number of clips, I’ll Crop them:
In the above example, I’ve got three short loops from a single song. The Crop command will create a new audio file for each one, containing the audio beginning at the Start marker and ending at the end of the loop brace (if it’s a loop), or the End marker (if it’s a one-shot). These new audio files are written into the new project folder:
It’s important to remember that you’re only going to save a lot of disk space if your original files are mostly WAV or AIFF. When Live crops files, it writes uncompressed audio, so if you crop a lot of mp3s, you can end up making a bunch of audio files that are much shorter in duration than the originals, but take the same amount of disk space since they are uncompressed.
If you’ve got both WAVs and MP3s in your set, you’re probably best off to Crop the WAVs and leave the MP3s alone. When you’re done cropping, use the Collect All and Save command to pull the MP3s into the project folder. Now you can zip up the project folder and send it off.
It’s a bit of extra work, but much less frustrating than having a gigantic upload fail after several hours.
