I am trying to move a site from a live URL to my local MAMP environment. How could I do this as I am having a real pain in the back side doing this as wp-admin keeps on redirecting me to my live site or saying certain pages don't exist.
I'm assuming you've already copied your entire WordPress directory from your web server to your local MAMP folder.
To take care of the database and URLs, I find it easiest to export the entire DB from your web server using phpMyAdmin or similar, then run find and replace on the exported SQL file to replace your old url (http://www.yourwebsite.com/) with your MAMP url (http://localhost:8888/yourwebsite) then run the SQL script to install the database locally (I use SequelPro).