"not enough memory" error & crash / LOOPER

[nowtime]

With lack of stability, Live 8 is really unusable for me ever since I get these unrecoverable crashes called "Not enough memory available: Please save your Live set and quit" (you cannot save at this point).

Trying to get a feel for how many users get this and what my problem is. Are you using Looper?. How many Loopers? Are you a power user with lots of devices and/or clips and scenes and/or plugins?

Mac/PC?

I've built a wonderful ergonomic 8-track looper rack controlled by a Nano Pad. It's beautiful. But my set crashes often. I've been in contact with support.

[gjm]

I have never had this message. I have never had Live crash. I have never used a looper. I am not a power user. I record mostly audio between 15-20 tracks max. I do not use any 3rd party AU's.

All the best. G.

[rbmonosylabik]

I do get it whenever I try to use a rack that makes constant use of 3 Loopers. There's a big thread related to this bug in the Support forums

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=114814

[[nis]]

Just a few words on this one: Each instance of Looper needs to reserve RAM, regardless if there's something playing or not. That's approx. 80-100 MB per Looper. With too many Loopers in a set, you will quickly fill up your RAM. If you reach the limits of your OS (2 GB / max 3 GB on a 32-bit Windows system or resp. 4 GB on Mac OS X), you will get a "not enough memory" warning and Live will eventually freeze or crash.

Other common reasons for RAM overloads are:
- too many clips in a set
- too many sliced samples in drum racks
- plugins with huge sample-banks loaded into the RAM

The "not enough memory" warning really means that you're overloading your RAM somehow. All you can do in this case is to find the critical parts and shrink the set or get more RAM if your computer / OS supports it.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Nico

[rbmonosylabik]

Thanks for the info Nico. I understand that RAM needs to be reserved for this kind of recording. The part that I think is really annoying is that once you get the warning, there's not much you can do to scale back, other than force quitting, relaunching Live, reopening the set, getting rid of the Loopers and hope you don't get the error again when trying to save the set. It just feels way more cumbersome than it should, and makes it appear like a bug rather than a simple limitation.

[[nis]]

Thanks for the info Nico. I understand that RAM needs to be reserved for this kind of recording. The part that I think is really annoying is that once you get the warning, there's not much you can do to scale back, other than force quitting, relaunching Live, reopening the set, getting rid of the Loopers and hope you don't get the error again when trying to save the set. It just feels way more cumbersome than it should, and makes it appear like a bug rather than a simple limitation.

Well, it really depends on how quickly Live can detect a RAM overload. Sometimes it shows the warning early enough, so that you can still save your work, sometimes it freezes and sometimes it doesn't even have a chance to display a warning and crashes right away. Displaying the error message even costs a (very tiny) bit of RAM, which might be just enough to freeze Live in such a scenario. In an ideal world you would need some kind of a RAM meter, but this would not always provide a reliable overview about the true RAM load, it would cost additional resources and it may look quite scary sometimes, e.g. when your OS allocates RAM to other processes or when you do certain things in Live where RAM gets allocated to certain things. Not easy.

[nowtime]

@NIS

Could there be a memory leak or somesuch problem with Live 8? I used to run this set just fine with 2gb ram. I added 2 more gb ram and got Live 8 and at that time I was only using 1 looper and I got the error message (which NEVER let's me savemy work).

[zigzag]

@NIS

Could there be a memory leak or somesuch problem with Live 8? I used to run this set just fine with 2gb ram. I added 2 more gb ram and got Live 8 and at that time I was only using 1 looper and I got the error message (which NEVER let's me savemy work).

There are most definitely memory leaks. They have been reported since one of the first live 8 betas. Nothing was done. I can't believe we get no attention for such issues. Not only Looper is causing this, hot swapping presets also or even opening/closing sets without exiting.

[spaced_]

the looper is -E V I L- ... in a great way. once the overdubs and reverse are on you just can't control that little shit. wonderful. speak of the devil i did a set with it last night and nothing happened. still figuring out better ways to work with it. hopefully not ever to any other user. maybe the errors and crashes are due to heavy usage because what i do, i'd switch it on and off and not throughout a set or track. a little dry and then wet now then?



cheers

[nowtime]

Yeah. A REALLY disappointing big little tease Abe's Looper is. I am running a set now with only one Looper and it is running fine so far. It works so well, I want more.

Four Loopers would be the absoulte minimum to do what I want.

I'm just going to have to let it go and see where else the universe wants me to go. It's clear that a Multi-Track Looper is not in the cards.

Come on Abes! Finish what you start! A 1-track Looper is kind of lame.