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The shape of Crate

You have a folder with years of Live sets in it. Some are finished; most are not. Opening each one to remember what it is costs a session, so nobody does it, and the folder keeps growing.

Crate reads that folder and turns it into a plan. It asks three things of you, once: look at the checklists, know your phases, then point Crate at the folder. Each idea has its own page in this manual; this page is the map.

The scan

Crate scans your folder and reads every .als in your browser. Read-only folder access. Crate never changes your files; nothing is uploaded.

Scanning needs a Chromium browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, or Opera) on the machine that holds the projects. Crate reads the .als files Live creates; it does not replace Live, and it is not affiliated with Ableton.

From folder to board

Six ideas, in the order a project meets them.

  1. Every scanned project lands in the Inbox and waits for you.
  2. Triage sorts the pile, one project at a time, into workflow phases.
  3. The board shows those phases as columns; a project sits in exactly one.
  4. Each phase carries a checklist that says what done means there.
  5. A pipeline is the ordered set of phases, and it is what the board renders; checklists attach to a pipeline’s phases.
  6. A workspace binds one folder and supplies a default pipeline. That part is plumbing; the concepts are the pages that follow.