Setting Up Ableton 12's New Browser: User Guide

Ableton Live 12 is released March 5th and the improvements to the browser are incredible and complex. This guide will show you how you can take advantage of the tagging and filter system, place save searches in the library, and flex the sound similarity features. While this will take you a little bit of time, it is so useful and will save you hours and hours of time in the future. Each musician and producer who uses ableton will have different preferences and needs, this tutorial will show you how to customize your browser to optimize your workflow.

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[thegeenius]

thorough breakdown, , so very appreciated, -- like lots of others, , i've been on the beta for a couple months, but literally skipped the browser because it just seemed more confusing to me-, this Here is .. Priceless - thank u

[pleggli]

The label system has a lot of promise but it is probably also the feature that needs most work of all the Live 12 stuff to become really powerful. I hope Live 12.1 will have workflow improvements for working with the tags.

[Yeahrightttt]

Question, what is the difference of putting your compressors into the 'multiband comps folder' compared to putting it in to your 'favorites'

[wethesame]

Great tutorial! I created some saved searches with my own categorisation, but somehow there are totally unrelated plugins in the saved searches. Guessing it is a bug, anyone else having that issue?

Example: I have category for drum plugins, added some of faves like Battery 4, Drum rack, created a search for it, all good. Now when I go to the saved search there shows up all the m4l drum synths, plus Max audio instrument, Impulse, Meld and others. I double checked and they do not have my custom tag

[TommyRarivoson]

Thanks for this vid. It really helps. Where can i find the ultimate 4 drumrack? SOunds interesting

[nicosauer]

Great stuff! Especially the save search part!!
Does anyone know how to add the .vstpreset or .adg files from the user library to the saved searches? These are always missing :(

[SCabriales]

After 4 months, still hate the tag system ableton implemented without letting you decide if you like it or want the old browser, I ended up hiding everything except the "All" option and only use cmd+F to look for stuff... if I forgot the name of something.. well, it wasn't that important I guess.
I took so much time organizing my user folders and creating a template that looks clean and let me work fast, the tag system is just so weird for me.

[eento]

The worst thing in this browser is about the way it shows the stock plugin preset when swapping, it mixes the plugin’s preset with other devices sometimes! What a hell

[gd_xl]

CMD+F has stopped searching all files on my computer when i use it, only shows some. if i manually click to a folder then search for the desired item it’s there, just not when i CMD F.

any ideas why?

[traviswonder]

Did anyone else try to follow this tutorial, only to find that their samples have ALREADY been added to Abletons browser?

[JakeCuley]

I'm so embarrassed I didn't know about cmd+F in ableton. Clicking around each section like a moron and also feeling like my brain is going to explode fighting the software when I'm just trying to be creative lol

[ChristianBoragine]

the new browser is just awful. rely almost exclusively on filters if bad UX.

[davida]

this definitely helps....but i still think this new browser is a mess. after using the beta for over a month before this release, i just don't see the value (and i probably just don't have the patience) to go through the long list of various plugins & 3rd party stuff that i have. i understand the flexibility this may give, but i think there's users like myself that just want things to work without having to fully customize things & this simply doesn't do that.

[AntiGuru]

Just here to say the old browser was better and more intuitive.

[MichalGutkowski]

So saving filters is basically what collections have previously offered (the only benefit is that you can have more saved searches than collections) – still don't see a point in this feature.

[engeomusic]

I had to test all the plugins I use in my live performances when you mentioned that you choose AUv2 over VST3. I haven't used any AU plugins since moving to M1.

I did repeated stress tests to check performance between the two formats. (ie. play 10 Pigments poly patches simultaneously.) In all cases, the difference was repeatable but minimal (1-2%). For those of us who perform live with Live, that extra 1-2% could be the difference between a glitch or a crash and a smooth performance.

For Arturia Pigments and Kilohearts plugins, AUv2 was the clear winner.

For Melda, Valhalla and Minimal Audio plugins, VST3 won overall, with some Melda plugins performing slightly better in AUv2, but most in VST3.

So, based on my very limited testing, I think its pretty developer specific as to whether a plugin is more optimized in AUv2 or VST3 format. You would think AU plugins would run more efficiently without the Steinberg VST wrapper, but supposedly some developers just wrap their VSTs in an AU wrapper.

Anyway, great video as always! Auto sample tagging is definitely coming soon, it's only logical.

[etiennestehelin]

This is a great tutorial. I hate the new browser. Let me do things my way….stop forcing me to do it Ableton way😢

[joechapman]

This video helps a lot, and it looks like it works when you're explaining it, but when I go to do it it's just ridiculously unintuitive. I already know I'm going to have to come back to this video repeatedly whenever I want to do this again. The UI fights me every step of the way and I cannot imagine why they designed it like this. They could have just hired a UI specialist to do this bit. And really, all they had to do was add some more colours to Collections like we've been asking in the Centercode since Live 10 came out.

[fritsvanzanten]

Wouldn't it be easier when
1) The search box would be right above the 'filters'? Now it's to far too the left, without a necessary reason (AFAIK), making it 'unconnected'.
2) We'd be ablele to just fold in/out (collapse) these three; collections, library, places?
I used the colors to groups synths, piano;s etc.

[SideFlame]

Collections seems to work better than search folders for now. I have the Live 8 Compressor and I tagged it as a compressor but for some reason it doesn't show up when I save it as a search. It's definitely tagged as a compressor but it doesn't show up.