Your set opens with missing files. Here's how to get the audio back.

Live says "media files are missing", clips show up hollow, and the session you finished last spring plays silence. Work through this in order — the last two steps are the ones most guides skip, and they are usually where the audio actually is.

First, understand what broke

A Live set does not contain your audio. It contains pointers to audio — a path, and sometimes a second path as a backup guess. When a file moves, gets renamed, lives on a drive that is not plugged in, or was never inside the project folder to begin with, the pointer goes stale and Live marks the clip offline. The audio is very often still on your machine. Live just cannot see it from where it is looking.

That distinction matters, because it tells you what you are hunting: a file that exists somewhere, not a file that is gone.

1. Read what Live is actually telling you

The status bar at the bottom shows how many files are missing. Click it, or open View → Manage Files → Manage Set, then Missing Files. Hit the triangle to expand the list and you get the single most useful piece of information in this whole process: the path each file was last seen at.

Read those paths before you touch anything. They tell you which of the four common cases you are in: an external drive that is not connected, a folder you reorganised, a sample-pack location that changed, or files that were always outside the project folder.

2. Let Live search for them

In that same panel, click Locate. Set Search Folder to a folder you believe contains the audio, switch the folder search On, and press Go. Live scans by filename.

Point it at the narrowest folder that could plausibly hold the files. Searching an entire drive can take a very long time and often returns the wrong copy of a commonly-named file — and Audio 03.wav is a very common name.

3. Search by filename yourself

If Live's own search comes up empty, look with your operating system instead: Spotlight on macOS, File Explorer's search on Windows. Search for the exact filename from the Missing Files list.

When you find it, note the folder, then use Locate with that folder as the search directory. You are giving Live a smaller haystack rather than a needle.

4. Check the Backup folder

Inside your project folder there is a Backup folder holding previous versions of the set, saved automatically. If a recent edit is what broke things — you consolidated, cropped, or re-recorded over a take — an older set in there may still point at audio that still exists.

Open the backup as a copy, never over the top of your current work. If it opens whole, you have your audio back and can rebuild forward from there.

5. The two cases nothing above will fix

Be honest with yourself early, because this saves hours:

• The audio was overwritten. If you re-recorded onto the same file, or bounced over it, the old take is not a pointer problem. It is gone from the disk. Only a backup that captured the bytes has it.
• The audio was deleted. Emptied trash, cleaned-up project folder, wiped scratch drive. Undelete tools sometimes work if you stop writing to that drive immediately, but the odds fall by the hour.

If you are in either case, stop hunting and check every backup you have — Time Machine, File History, an external drive, whatever synced. You are looking for the file itself now, not the link to it.

How to stop this happening again

One habit fixes most of it: File → Collect All and Save at the end of a session. That copies referenced audio into the project folder, so the set stops depending on files scattered around your drive. It makes the project bigger. It also makes it portable, which is the whole point.

Understand what it does not do, though. Collect All and Save protects the current state. It does not give you last Tuesday's version, it does not help when you overwrite a take, and it does nothing if the drive fails.