Sample Sweep
Ableton never cleans up after itself. You record fifteen takes and keep two. You freeze a track, unfreeze it, and the freeze file stays on your drive forever. Same with every consolidate, crop, bounce and reversed clip. Nothing ever gets removed, and once you have a few hundred projects there is no realistic way to go through it all yourself.
Sample Sweep reads every Live Set in a folder you choose, works out which samples each one actually uses, and shows you what is left over. The first time we ran it on our own projects it found 7.4 GB across 397 projects, in about ten seconds.
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It never deletes anything
Files are moved to a folder you pick, with a record of where each one came from. Open your projects and make sure they still load, then archive that folder or trash it yourself. If anything is missing, hit Put Files Back and everything goes back where it came from, even if you renamed or moved the folder since.
What it leaves alone
- Samples another project uses. It reads your whole folder at once, so anything two projects share is kept.
- Frozen tracks. A frozen track still needs its freeze file, so those stay. It only flags the ones left behind after you unfreeze.
- Bounces and masters. Audio outside the Samples folder is listed separately and held back by default.
- Anything one of Live's own backups still uses, so you can still restore an old version of a Set.
What you need
- macOS 13 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
- Ableton Live 10, 11 or 12. It reads both the old and new Set formats.
How to use it
- Open it and point it at your Ableton folder. Pick the biggest folder you can, so it can see when two projects share a sample.
- Give it a few seconds to read your Live Sets.
- Go through what it found, project by project, and uncheck anything you want to keep.
- Move the rest out. Check your projects still load, then delete the folder whenever you're ready.
Signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a warning. One tip: quit Ableton before you sweep. A Set that's already open has its samples loaded in memory, so it will look fine even if something went wrong.