After some time now I’m still stuck in a state of inspiration-overflow. The lib is overflowing with cool sounds, clips, midi, fx and all the other stuff. When I bought Ableton Live Suite I got a kind of feeding frenzy and downloaded all included packs. Add all the cool free stuff which is available every day now. It keeps coming and coming and WONT STOP! No problem? BIG problem because I don’t get anything done!
- Spending precious time with browsing, checking, sorting the library instead of creating new songs
- Using cool sounds which are already cool out of the box doesn’t feel like “my stuff” in the end. I little alibi tweaking is just not enough in this case.
- Downloading cool new stuff and dreaming of songs to create with it is not the same as doing it.
- Small snippets/clips for the personal library is just making the above mentioned library a bit bigger (more to sort, right?)
“Done” = “Song done”, ok? So, all the steps above are procrastination.
Therefore, I decided to go minimal again. Right now, I’m de-installing all the live packs. Just some basic stuff remains, like piano sounds, drumming and some stuff from k-devices. I will delete my user lib and start fresh and new.
The resolution is to be very rigorous what’s to include into the library and what not to include. Criterion for this is “will do a song with it”. Maybe this will work out a little better than cruising through the lib all the time searching for the next happy accident.
I find it interesting that I don’t have this problem with Spectrasonic’s Trillian. That’s because they have a rating system implemented. You give 0-5 stars to the sounds and you can filter according to stars. Working for me pretty well. BTW, Stylus RMX by the same company does not have this system, so I still have to find a different method, here.
BTW copying GBs of data from my local computer to backup takes a lot of time… waiting is a good opportunity to write this blog post 🙂
-mE
productivemonkey 
Great Plan. i spend way too much time organizing crap instead of creating. My method has been more to just delete individual items i don’t like when i come across them. Since you can’t custom organize official packs i’ve actually used stuff from them much less so far than downloaded free stuff, etc. Clearing out never-used plugins is always a good idea too.
I tried to delete, too but as you say it’s not easy to do (switching to file system instead of ableton browser). New plan is therefore to copy all cool stuff into the user library. 1. Install Pack 2. Filter and Copy to User Library 3. Deinstall again (hoping for no broken links). I’ll see how this will work out.
BTW: I found cool stuff in my old Ableton 8 lib, too.
For everyone who started with Live 9: Check out the old versions, too.
Great post, it’s all about paring down so you are only left with the stuff you will actually use. Don’t forget to back it up too!
Thanks. It’s harder to do than I thought. Letting go of stuff which is “ok” but not “cool” … You might use it, still, some day, maybe, you know 🙂
Backup is a good point and a nice side-effect: You’ll need less space and don’t have to wait so long until the backup is finished.