Reinstalling Windows or switching computer doesn’t mean loosing all your Ableton Live clips, templates, etc. You should not have to start from scratch in VSTs such as ROLI Studio Player or Arturia’s Analog Lab. Even worse is loosing not only your favorites but also custom patches. All of this is stored in files that can be located, backed up and copied from one system to another. Problem is to find these files.
This post gathers notes about locations I found over time, so I don’t have to search these again and again, and hopefully this can be useful to others.
Ableton Live User’s library
From the File Explorer, click Documents.
There should be a folder named Ableton. Here, there is a subfolder named User Library. The final path looks something like:
C:\users\<your user name>\Documents\Ableton\User Library
This directory has several useful subdirectories worth copying over or backing up:
- Templates: Ableton Live templates used to start new Live sets without having, each time, to add tracks for your audio inputs or software synthesizers.
- Clips: audio clips you want to be accessible from any new project
- Samples: sample files, such as loops you recorded some time ago.
Note that if you are using Onedrive or Dropbox, you should disable backing up of Documents folder. If you turn on backup of Documents folder, Live may search for the user library in the Onedrive directory instead and that could affect its performance.
ROLI Studio Player favorites
These are the hearts you can associated with presets you like.
Press Windows key and type %AppData%. Go to ROLI subdirectory, Shared, then copy the favourites.xml file. The complete path looks something like
C:\users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\ROLI\Shared\favourites.xml
ROLI presets
Presets are located elsewhere:
- Equator 2: c:\users\<user name>\Documents\ROLI\Equator2: Playlists and Presets directories are particularly interesting
- Cypher2: c:\users\<user name>\Documents\FXpansion\Cypher2: Favourites and Presets are especially useful
- Strobe2: c:\users\<user name>\Documents\FXpansion\Strobe2: again Favourites and Presets
Arturia’s V Collection presets
These are stored in C:\ProgramData\Arturia\Presets. For each product, there is a directory in there, with a Factory and a User subdirectory.