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Cleaning up

Once in a while you may feel like cleaning up your set, for example when you want to share your set with someone else and you don't want to use Collect All And Save, which we discourage using, see below. You can then replace all plugins with the latest versions following these steps:

  1. Create a backup of your current Live Set.
  2. Open the 'File Manager' in Live, under the View menu.
  3. Click on 'Manage Set' and then on 'View Files'.
  4. Locate the new plugins in Live's Browser.
  5. Drag-and-drop each plugin you're using from the Browser on the left onto the name of the plugin in the File Manager on the right.
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Note that in rare cases, this may change the way your set looks. Although we try to never change the visual output of plugins after they were released and only add new features that don't affect the existing ones, when a plugin contained a bug we may have fixed it, potentially changing the visual output in a newer version. In other words, only switch to newer plugin versions if you have time to test them.

Checking the current version of a plugin​

To easily check which version of plugins you currently have in your set, hover your mouse cursor over the plugin title bar and Live will show you the path of the plugin in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.

Current plugin version

Quickly updating all plugins to the latest versions​

Live doesn't make it easy to quickly replace all Max For Live plugins in a set to new versions with the same names. Whenever we need to do this, we

  1. Close Live.
  2. Back up the old plugins where Live can't find them by zipping / archiving their folder. Then use Option + Command + Backspace to delete the folder while skipping Trash (moving them to Trash will not work, Live will find them there!).
  3. Open the Live Set, making Live report that plugins are missing.
  4. Open the Missing Files browser (by clicking on the orange error message in the Status Bar).
  5. Manually point Live to the new plugin versions, one-by-one.
  6. Note that auto-searching for new plugins will make them show up as candidates instead. Even though the new devices may have the same names as their older versions, Live sees that the file sizes or dates are different and refuses to automatically replace them.

Using Collect All And Save responsibly​

When using Beam devices in your Live Set, when using Collect All And Save, it is best to exclude Files from User Library so that you don't end up with copies of Beam plugins in your collected files. The new system you are moving your Live Set to should already contain the Beam plugins you need after installing the latest version of Beam. If not, you can always separately copy the missing plugins to the new system.