D flashing, Too many audio tracks

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:19 pm

Hi,
the D is flashing and the audio is cut off, probably too many tracks, what would be the best way to be able to play more tracks ?
I have one HD for the system, another for the audio data. defragmented.
I've put the latency to the max (1028)
The CPU is not very high 35% in Live, on the XP task manager, it's about 60%,
when 25 tracks have to play together, it can't.
thanks for advice

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:35 pm

you can swap RAM usage for drive bandwidth by hitting the RAM button in clip view.

that, or start bouncing tracks down.

what's your drive speed? 7200rpm is preferable but won't help you 'cause you can't change it.

laird · Post by **laird** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:50 pm

Is this a USB1 hard drive or something?

rasputin · Post by **rasputin** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:13 pm

Tone Deft wrote:you can swap RAM usage for drive bandwidth by hitting the RAM button in clip view....

I thought so too. I have a set where I can basically play from one huge sample (100MB) and the D flashes and the track will bog down. It's not even a fancy file (16 bit stereo 44.1k)

This is on a Core 2 Quad system with a SATA hard drive, running Live 7.0.2, 2 GB of RAM.

I can't see any difference at all if I check the RAM button or not.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:22 pm

that sucks. maybe there's an option in the preferences that's limiting the amount of RAM Live can use.

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 12:30 am

forgot to say that the tracks are 44Khz 16 bit mono,

Ram: it puts the track in ram, but these are the exported tracks of a song I'm mixing, and they're running all the way, so putting 4 minutes x n of tracks, in ram is going to be a bit heavy as I only have 1Gb

but bouncing is not an opton for now.

So no magic setting in XP or something ?
thx

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 12:31 am

go spend the $100 on RAM, I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and the difference is better than sex.

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 4:45 pm

OK so more ram means more tracks , sure ?

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:09 pm

Chris J wrote:OK so more ram means more tracks , sure ?

Not really. I've streamed 24 or more tracks from my old Pentium 2 400 ghz, 265 mb ram, 20 gb HD. But the HD was 7200 rpm.

My Mac Mini and HP laptop with 5400 rpm HD can easily stream 16-20 tracks. I'd say that your S-ATA is more than sufficient. And just playing audio from disc doesn't use that much RAM.

Strange behaviour this. 25 mono tracks is no biggie.

-M

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:12 pm

the only setting I see is
options-preferences-file folder - cleanup decoding cache
maybe that's the glut.

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:17 pm

Tone Deft wrote:go spend the $100 on RAM, I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and the difference is better than sex.

I was experiencing similar problems as OP, and it was fixed by buying RAM as well.

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:24 pm

ethios4 wrote:
Tone Deft wrote:go spend the $100 on RAM, I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and the difference is better than sex.
I was experiencing similar problems as OP, and it was fixed by buying RAM as well.

I stand corrected then.

SubFunk · Post by **SubFunk** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:39 pm

Lo-Fi Massahkah wrote:
ethios4 wrote:
Tone Deft wrote:go spend the $100 on RAM, I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and the difference is better than sex.
I was experiencing similar problems as OP, and it was fixed by buying RAM as well.
I stand corrected then.

i did not had problems, however doubling my ram did made my system noticable snappier and had an effect on amount on samples i can load, etc. but i can't say that it had an noticable effect on pure trackcount.

but ram is so cheap now, that i think it's worth it, defenitely it's going to make your whole system faster, you can have more apps open at the same time without slowing it down majorly, everything rectacts somehow snappier, etc. in my case it was probably the best 60 euros spend for going to 4gb of ram.

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:39 pm

Lo-Fi Massahkah wrote:
ethios4 wrote:
Tone Deft wrote:go spend the $100 on RAM, I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and the difference is better than sex.
I was experiencing similar problems as OP, and it was fixed by buying RAM as well.
I stand corrected then.

Nah, you're right. OP was asking if adding more RAM would definitely fix the problem...you were just pointing out that it may not fix the problem, which is correct.

The thing that convinced me that RAM was my problem is that I looked at my available physical RAM, and my page file size in task manager. I had almost no available physical RAM and a huge page file. That led me to believe my RAM was maxed out and CPU was being eaten up by the OS having to constantly move things in and out of the page file. I assume this was correct because adding a gig of RAM fixed the problem.

Chris J, do you have tons of FX in your track?

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:44 pm

I didn't think of the page file being what was "stealing" disc performance. But that might be a solution.

Smart.