For using the same music on different machine

Put your ableton clips folder in the same folder as your music and put it on a external drive harddrive. And set ableton to that folder over you different machines.

This way if you need to mover the folder or use different machines u will able to without ableton spending ages finding all yr tunes!

Im posting this as i wish id know this ages ago!

you maybe doing this already?

or... using just one machine.

It doesn't resolve issues with having different plugins on the systems and some finer mac vs pc compatibility issues between them.

I had reaktor on a mac and the pc and b/c they used a different technology (audio units vs vst) I had issues loading ableton projects on those machines when I moved them.

One machine is not an option!
Not for me anyway! ;)

Pluggins is no problem cause i just mirror my pluggin folder on both systems. It was the fact that i had spent so much time warping my tracks and then found the clips couldnt find the orginals!

Now at least i know now that i can play on any machine without too much of a faff!

As for pc and mac. I stick with mac!

I'd stick w/ pc if I owned my own laptop.

Perhaps it's time for Ableton clustering and failover for ultimate uptime.

Ableton HA with DRS!

Hahaha nice. Lets build a 128-node ableton super cluster.

Now we're talking.

How would it work?

Hmm... well you've got a few approaches I suppose. One would be to run 16 laptops or so with Ableton on each, and configure 2 or 3 as masters and link all the others to them, that way you can handle a laptop going down, and keep going.

Another way would be to build a virtualised OS out of a cluster of those laptops, running Ableton on that. Except you'll probably have to use Beowulf or something to do the clustering, which isn't going to handle Windows or OS X. Does Ableton run under Wine? I know Reason can.

Ultimately these will be your problems, limitation on the host OS, and then limitations within Ableton. Clearly Ableton AG have not built their software with scalability in mind.

could do it with VMWare but VMWare Infrastructure doesn't have sound drivers for Windows unlike VMWare Workstation. :-)

ok its an old post but I just realized that I can DJ with live... this may make things easier for me seeing that I already use live in production sometimes.

I haven't tried this but I have a edirol ua-25 sound card that has 1 stereo output... to preview the cue track in the headphones ... couldn't I map that to the laptops internal soundcard and plug my headphones into my laptops headphone jack?

How does the crossfading work in abletons live?
Can you do it in software with a midi controller or do you need to hook the outputs up to an actual mixer?

you can't set both live to use both soundcards by default... you would need to install something like, ASIO4ALL I believe which will allow you make both sound cards look like one soundcard with multiple outs... 

Ableton has a cross fader built in ... 

here is a good beginners article from way back in Live 3...

http://www.ableton.com/pages/tips/2004_04

yes is the answer.. U can do it with a midi controller. each channel is assignable to the crossfader. just set the master cross fader to a your cross fader on yr midi controller

I guess I should hold off the questions till I get home and attempt to set it up haha.. I wish I had my laptop with me ;-)

I'm using the ASIO4ALL drivers with Traktor, works like a charm. (Aggregates multiple sound devices into a single virtual device with x number of outputs.)