Do you build instrument racks in Ableton, and sometimes find that Live will duplicate some of your samples in the ‘Imported’ folder? If so, you’re not alone. I encountered this frustrating anomaly some time ago while building out some new instrument racks. Since I could not find anything about it on the internet, I thought I would offer my solution, and hopefully help other Ableton users that are experiencing this.
How to avoid Ableton making duplicates of your audio samples in your Imported folder
1. Create an instrument rack with the samples you wish to use,
2. From there, save it as a preset in Ableton’s browser.
3. After this, Hot Swap the current instrument rack with the recently saved rack.
4. At this point, your original samples should be saved correctly in the ‘Samples’ folder in your User Library location. This is located in the following pathway:
Macintosh HD/Users/[username]/Music/Ableton/User Library/Samples/Imported
5. Any future changes you make to your instrument rack currently in your project will not create the dreaded duplicate audio files.
Note; this has only happened to me when initially buidling instrument racks. I’ve never experienced this phenomenon otherwise.
You can also double check that Ableton has saved your samples by right-clicking on the sample in the Samples window, and choosing ‘locate in Finder’ from the contextual menu.