How to Export a Master, Premaster and Stems in Ableton Live

All right, so now that your track is mixed and mastered, the next thing I wanna talk about is exporting your track. This may be pretty simple for a lot of people, but I just wanted to include it for maybe people that didn't know. So you have your full track, now it's time to export it. What I'm gonna do always, my first step, is I am going to highlight from the first marker or the beginning of the song, and I'm gonna highlight all the way to the last marker, the end of

the song. And you can see that I put this last marker a little bit after the actual end of the song. So the song doesn't cut off abruptly and maybe has like a little bit of a reverb tail. So let's listen to the end here. So there's a little echo from the vocal. And if I had the end marker here, it would completely cut off that echo. So what I'm gonna do is I am going to highlight from the beginning all the way to the end, and I'm gonna hit Command-L

to make a loop mark. And this is really useful because if I'm gonna hit Command-Shift-R, this is the shortcut to export. If you go to this window right here, you're gonna see Render Start 1, Render Length 12. And that's because you have selected up here, bars 1 through 13. But then if you click off of here and you hit Command-Shift-R, you're gonna see the Render Length is 184. And that's because our loop marker here is set to 184. So by having the loop marker here, you're ensuring that you're rendering your

track at the correct length. So we're gonna hit Command-Shift-R, and let's go from top to bottom. So we have Render Track Main. So if you hit a dropdown here, you could render out like a specific track, like if you just wanted to render out the kick, if you just wanted to render out the drums, or you could render out the entire track main, which is that's what we're gonna do because we want to render out our entire master. We have Render Start and Render Length here. That's all set up with

the loop selector. Then we have these options here, Include, Return, and Main Effects. This is grayed out because if it's on the main, it's going to include the main effects. But if we selected kick here, we could then select, do we wanna export just the kick track, or do we wanna export the kick track after it went through the master chain? So this is where you could select that here as well. Then we have Render as Loop. This is good if you're rendering out like samples, or if you're exporting like

loops, you can render it as a loop. And I'm not sure if this is going to, there's another thing, this analysis file down here. I don't know if that's going to embed that in the analysis file, like, hey, this thing is a loop. I actually have never really used this. Then there's Convert to Mono. I mean, this is if you want to export something and convert it to Mono, which I never do. Normalize, sometimes this is good. What normalize means is if you export something that's really quiet and you select

normalize on, it will detect the highest peak. And if the highest peak is like eight decibels away from zero, what it's gonna do is it's gonna turn that entire track up eight decibels. So the highest peak reaches zero decibels. So this is a way, if you have like really quiet tracks, to just export them and make sure they're as loud as they can possibly be. And I don't do this to exported songs. I normally would do this if I had a bunch of samples that I was exporting. Then you have

Create Analysis File. In Ableton, there's some files that are analysis files called like ASD or something like that. I actually have this turned off in my settings, I believe. Let me see, File, Folder. Okay, Create Analysis File. So this is on by default. So whenever I drag a sound into Ableton, it will create an analysis file. So Ableton doesn't have to analyze the sound every single time I drag it in to the DAW. So in the Export section, you can create an analysis file for this. Again, I think this is

good if you're creating like a sample pack or something. Then we have Sample Rate here. Sample Rate is where you can choose what sample rate you want the track to be rendered at. So by default, I always select 44,100. You'll see that there's this message right here. Project will be rendered at 48 hertz and down sampled to 44,100 hertz. This is because my audio interface for whatever reason always adjusts back to 48,000 hertz by default. Really doesn't matter. I just always make sure that I'm exporting at 44,100 hertz because that

is like the industry standard for streaming. That's what Spotify wants. And it really doesn't make a difference. I've just always done 44.1 kilohertz or 44,100 hertz. So this is what I always export it as. Not gonna make a huge difference. Definitely don't do any others besides 44,100 or 48,000. All of these would be good maybe if you were like recording bands and whatnot and you wanted that like super, super high fidelity, but it's nothing that you're really gonna hear. And it's definitely, you definitely don't wanna export your final master as

anything other than 44,100 hertz or 48,000 hertz. Then we have this section down here in code PCM. This basically means that you want to, like if you turn this off, the export button becomes grayed out because now we're not exporting anything. PCM is basically like your wave file or your high fidelity export. So you could pick AIFF, which is like the Apple interface, or you could pick FLAC. I always go with wave because that's just the industry standard. Then we have BitDep. This is really, really important. So there's 16, 24

and 32. 16 was the standard for CDs. 16 is very safe for a lot of streaming platforms as well. Some platforms prefer 16, but most prefer 24. 24 is the all around safest bit depth that you wanna export at. And the reason being is because 32 bit is called a 32 bit float. And what happens is you can record stuff in 32 bit. And this is actually really handy because if you accidentally clip or go above zero, you're not actually clipping and you can recover those lost peaks if you're using

32 bits. But when you export your final track is 32 bit, it most of the time will not work on CDJs. So I can't tell you how many times people have sent me 32 bit files. I go to play it on my CDJs and it says file type not supported, then I can't play the track. So a good practice is just using 24 bit. Then we have Dither options. Dither like really doesn't matter for I've never ever once like had to like think about this. I think what Dither does is

it's how the very, very, very quietest signal is handled. And I think it's like a space saving thing. And I think this was really important for like CDs and you know, making small file types and handling like a bunch of data. I think this is a way to handle those really low signals. I could be wrong. I think I just have it on triangular. I think that's just the default and I've never ever changed it, doesn't matter. Then you have encode MP3 down here. This is if you wanna export like

a MP3 along with your wave or you could turn the wave off and just export the MP3. So if you're somebody that likes to give people a wave version of the track and an MP3 version of the track like if you're sending out your track to other DJs, this is a good option to leave on. So you export both versions. But I typically just have this off because most of the time I'm just using wave. Then you have video. This is grayed out because I don't have any video in Ableton,

but Ableton actually does support video and you can export video with this. I never use this though. Some people like to do this with like live performances, like especially if they're chopping or they're like scoring something. So I've like one time scored like a trailer. And so I drug the trailer into here and then I placed like all the sounds to the video. And then I just exported the whole video out, like as a demo, that's something you could do there. But then what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna

wanna hit export and then you're gonna want to find your Ableton projects wherever it may be and make a new folder and we'll just call this turn up the bass. And then I would make another new folder, call this exports. And then I would typically name this something like if it was my own track, I would just call this hellbound, turn up the bass. And then you hit enter and it starts to render the audio. And it usually doesn't take that long unless you have a ton of plugins in your

track, but still it's not gonna take longer than a couple of minutes, you know? So we'll wait for this to complete. Okay, and now it's done. And now if we go into that folder, we have our new folder that we made. And you can see here, we have this ASD, which is the analysis file and then we have the wave file as well. And so I'm gonna drag this into our project and you can see that we have our full track that we just exported right here. The waveform looks good.

It looks pretty darn good. And yeah, it doesn't seem to be any issues. Always check, you know, you always wanna check. Actually, I'm seeing an issue here right now. I can see that this export didn't actually go all the way to the end. And so that's maybe because I didn't select the loop marker before I hit export. Yeah, so now the render line says 185. So this is a case where I would drag it in to check and listen and just make sure that nothing went wrong. So that is how

you export a single track.

Now I wanna talk about how you can export stems. And this is the way that I like to export stems because this is just the way I trust. I don't know. So if you were to go to command shift R and you were to hit all individual tracks, what this is gonna do is all individual tracks is going to export the group and all the tracks below it. And I think way back in the day, I did this one time and it just did not work for me. So it export

the effects group, then the transition group, then each one of these individual tracks. But I think what it was doing is each one of these tracks was then not being routed through the group processing. So if I had a compressor, like a side chain compressor on here, it would export this track without the group processing. I don't know if that's still true. The last time I did it that way was probably over 10 years ago. And I was so shook that I just never did it again. So instead of selecting,

I'll select the loop marker. Instead of selecting all individual tracks, I will pick selected tracks only. And so then what I wanna do is I want to expand all of my groups and tracks so everything is shown, nothing is folded in. Then I'll select my bottom most track and then I'll select the top most track and hit shift. And this is going to select everything here. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hold command and deselect the groups. So then what we're left with is the only tracks

that are selected are the actual tracks, not the groups. But you could do something like this. If you were like, oh, I want all these drives to be like just exported as a single drive, you could hold command, deselect these drives and then select the drive group. So this gives you like a lot of flexibility of how you can export these sounds. You could do the same thing by deselecting all the tracks in the kick group and then just selecting the kick track. So here we're gonna have the kick, the

drives as one, then each percussion sound is individuals, both rides as individuals. And then all the rest of the sounds are gonna be exported individually. And then you're gonna select the loop marker. You could see that all of our tracks are still selected here. Hit command shift R, we'll pick selected tracks only. And then we would hit export. And this is gonna take a while, so I'm not gonna do it. But I always do it this way because this ensures that I have full control over like, if I want each

individual sound within the group to be exported or just the group itself. And it also ensures that if I'm picking the tracks that are inside of a group, that they're being routed through the group processing. So I'm getting any type of compression or side chaining or EQ or automations that I had on the group. Those are being included in the individual tracks. This way just works better for me. So I always recommend to select each track individually and then hit command shift R, make sure all your settings are correct and

then hit selected tracks only. So that is how you would export stems. So that is all the ways to export your track. Those are all the ways that I do it, let's say. There's, you know, you can find other videos out there that might have different ideas, but this is the way that I like to do it.