It reads your set, not just your folder
An Ableton set does not contain your audio — it points at it. RetakeSafe opens the set, follows every pointer, and finds each file it needs, including the samples living somewhere else on your drive.
In private beta
Ableton keeps the last few versions of your set — and none of your audio. Dropbox keeps your audio — and has no idea which take belongs to which set. RetakeSafe keeps the whole session as one moment: the set and every sample it needs, restorable together, on storage you already own.
And you know the other thing: you open a set from three months ago and half the clips are gone, because the audio moved, got re-recorded, or was never in the project folder at all.
An Ableton set does not contain your audio — it points at it. RetakeSafe opens the set, follows every pointer, and finds each file it needs, including the samples living somewhere else on your drive.
Every save becomes one restorable moment: the set plus every file, together. Audio you have not changed costs nothing to keep again, so a month of history takes a fraction of what copies would.
Scroll to Tuesday at 9:14pm and restore it as a copy — the set and the exact takes it used. Or pull one stem out of an old version and leave everything else alone.
Real output on a real Ableton 12 session: four audio files, one of them living outside the project folder. A take gets deleted, and the earlier night comes back byte for byte.
$ retakesafe inspect "Midnight Drive.als"
made with Ableton Live 12.0.5
tempo 92
tracks 4 audio, 2 midi
references 4 audio files it needs
ok lead vocal take 4.wav (Samples/Recorded/lead vocal take 4.wav)
ok drum bus.wav (Samples/Recorded/drum bus.wav)
ok bass DI.wav (Samples/Recorded/bass DI.wav)
ok vinyl crackle.wav (../Sample Library/vinyl crackle.wav)
every file present
$ retakesafe snap "Midnight Drive.als" --label "rough mix"
4 audio files · 54.9 MB in the session · 54.9 MB new in the vault
1 file lives outside the project folder (kept anyway)
# … the vocal is re-recorded, and saved again
$ retakesafe snap "Midnight Drive.als" --label "new vocal take"
4 audio files · 55.6 MB in the session · 18.2 MB new in the vault
# … and then the take is deleted
$ retakesafe inspect "Midnight Drive.als"
1 missing — this set would open broken
$ retakesafe restore 2026-09-07T02-02-33 "Restored - rough mix"
restored 5 files (54.9 MB)
the deleted take is back, byte for byteTwo snapshots of that session: 110.5 MB as copies, 73.1 MB in the vault — because audio you did not change is never stored twice.
RetakeSafe never writes into your working folder. It reads, and it copies out. Restores land somewhere new — it will refuse to write over a folder that is not empty. Your files are your income, and nothing we make is going to sit between you and a session.
Your vault is plain files and plain JSON on storage you own — an external drive, your NAS, your own cloud bucket. Readable without us, forever. We sell software, not hostage space.
Written for the bad day, whether or not you ever use RetakeSafe.
What "offline" actually means, and the order to try things in to get your audio back.
Ableton keeps more than most people know. Here is exactly where to look, in order.
Why Collect All and Save, Dropbox and Time Machine each miss something — and what covers it.
The engine works. The desktop app is being built now, and the first builds go to this list. Tell me what you work in and I will send it when it runs on your setup.