MBpro unable to handle live set of 16 audio tracks?

[M for momentum]

Hi people,

I have a live gig coming up this Friday and my 3-4 year old Mac Book Pro with a (2 year old) 7200rpm HDD seems to be having issues playing the wav clips properly. My live set consists of 2 x 8 audio tracks full of my tracks cut up in wav files (8 for track A, 8 for track B), that isn't that much or is it?

CPU load seems fine, never above 30-40 so I think it's my harddisk - weird thing is at some points it seems to have no difficulty whatsoever and it'll be playing all 16 audio tracks together just fine but then when I start a new song from somewhere else in my live set it's having these little but very annoying hick-ups causing some sounds not to get played (eg: it skips a few kick's or bass tones)

how can I fix this? it would be really annoying having this sort stuff happen during my gig so all the help is greatly appreciated!

[Sepp Ultura]

Upgrade your memory! At the moment I'm having the same problem..Live's not able to buffer all the samples and then fails to load them in time. Have a look at the top-right corner of your screen where there is a sign with a D (stands for "disk"). If that thing goes orange during your hickups it's the memory problem..

Matt

[Tarekith]

One thing that can help is to partition your HD so that the first partition is 10GB or so and just for your live set audio files. This places all the audio you'll be streaming at the outer portion of the drive and thus offers more throughput.

Maybe something like iDefrag can help as well.

[M for momentum]

I do indeed only have 2gig of internal memory... so I might want to look into upgrading that to 4? that should fix it?

I'll give your tips a go as well Tarekith, thanks

[Tarekith]

Get the free utility Menu Meters, it will show you exactly how much memory you're using at any time.