Ableton Forum

hi everybody, if anyone could assist it would be greatly appreciated.have a big show tommorow, the thing is:

im on macbook pro 13.3, 10.5.8 , 2.26, 2gb ram, 160gb harddisk with 54gb free space, and motu ultralite. (and tons of controllers, some arduino diy based but thats i guess irrelevant now, cause they wont cause any problem in other live set combinations...) my live set is almost audio only, and its size is around 3gb. somtimes(rarely but enough to bother) some audio will literally "drop off" i.e not clicks or crackles or whatever, literally wont play for a a sec and then continues. just like a small partial of the audofile was not read or somthing.sounds like a disk issue, right? the thing is that i dont see the disk indicator turning on or somthing... the cpu is around max 20%. i know 2gb ram is not much nowdays, and in the worst case ill just buy ram asap but i just need to know if it will solve the problem, as it seems that the pageout´s /swaps are not particularly high.... is it because of the size of the set? am i missing out on somthing?

any help will be GREATLY appriciated.....

Hello,

there is a memory leak issue at the moment related to audio files warped in complex pro mode. Are you using complex pro mode?

Are you having this issues in Session View or Arranger View? In Session View Live tries to pre-buffer all used audio clips, so there might be problem if you want to play a 3GB set with only 2GB Ram.

It's hard to guarantee that an audio performance issue can be solved just be installing more memory. But it's definitely worth a try!

Best,
Marian

hi m, thanks for replying, im in session mode...

almost all the samples are unwarped and those that are warped are on beat mode which is for my knowledge the least expensive one?

ive just did a stress test, let some files in the set play while running the following apps on the background: final cut, photoshop, chrome, photobooth, nodebox, proccesing. it was playing fine. added max/msp and it was to much for my comp and there were drop outs... so somehow it seems to me that its not a ram issue?


any test´s i could preform? it seems to me that it happens only after a while tho, and mainly with the latest files ive added to the set...

same issue here
i'm having a really important show on thursday too...

audio wont play for a a few sec and then continues too....

I also have a MOTU ultralite...

i think i'll play this show with the macbook internal card...maybe the MOTU the culprit ??

Hi,

beats mode should work fine!

Can you send me details about your audio settings (buffer size, sample frequency, bit depth of the used audio files)

Do you get the same result when increasing the audio buffer size?

Best,
Marian

P.S.: I will check tomorrow if we have an Ultralite in the office to test...

dont think so, it happens with my internal soundcard aswell....

@marian im on 128,44100, and mostly 16bit (maybe some tiny part of it is 24bit) having a total of 249 clips, approx. set size is less than 3gb i see now, its around 2.4gb.

happens in both 128/256 with both internal and ultralite..

p.s, i have around 45 channels, most of them are just for playing audio with no fx or anything... as said, i dont notice any major cpu consumption. i mostly play 4 audio files simultaneously, each is around 4 or 5 minutes long.

it's really a random thing......sometimes i get it 3 times in a row. Sometimes, all is ok.
just did a test with latest drivers from MOTU (i was on an oldest version), all went well, but.....i'm still suspicious..i hope it's that..
it seems to happen, when the computer and/ or LIVE is On for a long time....
Because , i'm usually let the computer turned on in the venue long time before i'm playing...i think that for my next live set i'll launch LIVE at the last minute
I just did a 1h set after restarting the computer and no problems..
Fingers crossed..

oh..and my set doesn't contain any "complex pro" warped files either..

same here..sometimes it happens and sometimes not.. but somehow its hard for me to blame the motu... im also doing other acts, computationally much more complex than this set, with more or less the same setup, but never had this before....

Hi,

we did a fix related to performance problems of big Live sets in Live 8.1.5b1 (see release notes: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... ve+8.1.5b1)

The latest Beta is 8.1.5b2 and can be found here: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 90&start=0

Please download this version and verify if the problem still persists.

Cheers,
Marian

in fact, i'm running the beta.....and got it once...
My show is tomorrow, i'll keep you updated on how it went..

so i ran the beta all day long, did got some dropouts at some point... if it helps anyone, my conclusion is that its clearly a ram issue, after a while my free ram is getting less and less (lets say after i played 30 minutes of 4 channel 16 bit), then some ram get "swaped", usually when ive got 10mb ram free. then drop outs. i dont know if its live to blame for consuming too much ram, or os-x to blame for having this wierd free/inactive system, or 2gb is just not enough nowdays...

Hi,

I will test this issue and hope to provide some news on that soon.

Best,
Marian

ok thanks, waiting for some news... this has really brought up some questions about how efficient ram mgmt in os x really is...