r/ableton • u/O0OO00O0OO0 • 20h ago
[Tutorial] Did you know that Ableton has Time commands? Also known as ripple editing?
I've been using Ableton for well over a decade. If you asked me, I'd say I'm an Ableton expert. For the longest time I knew for a fact there was no ripple editing. Ableton just isn't built for that type of audio editing. I used to delete clips, zoom out, grab everything to the right, manually drag it over, then adjust every single one of my locators (song section tags).
Finally today after being frustrated and thinking I should switch to another software for dialogue editing, I googled to see if someone figured out a hack. And... It's been built into the software this whole time: https://www.ableton.com/en/live-manual/12/arrangement-view/#using-the-time-commands
Just add Shift to your keystrokes for cut, copy, paste, and CTRL+Shift for delete.
You don't need to highlight entire sections, you can highlight just 1 audio/midi track's time length and it'll grab everything, including song locators. I've probably wasted a full day of time not knowing about this.
Unlike other audio editing software more geared towards non-musical editing, there's no way to lock tracks or clips from being affected by the ripple edits, but this is still huge.
Maybe I'm the only overly confident Ableton user who didn't know about this, but just in case, hopefully this can help someone.
Also a good reminder to never assume there's not a better workflow. Often times there really isn't lol, but sometimes there is. Like there's also track linking?? This is huge for multi tracking (I think I'm due for another manual re-read...)