Need help/Issues with using External HD in DJing Live

[Jackson5Michael]

Hello,

Need some help with DJing in a live setting using an external hard drive. I am running a MacBook Pro w/ a Intel Core i7 2.8 GHz 4GB Memory 1067 MHz DDR3 and I have a 500GB internal hard drive with 403GB free and my external hard drive is a Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive.

I use Ableton to make mash-up mixes and on-the-fly mixes in a live setting. I also use it to DJ hip-hop (sometimes for live acts), top 40, and electronic/dubstep music. That being said, I have had no problems running all of my music files off of my internal hard drive. I am able to DJ flawlessly while running off of my internal hard drive. The only problem with running off my internal hard drive is it takes up about 200GB of my hard drive space to have all of my music/abelton files on there, allowing less than 200GB of free space for the rest of my hard drive. I want to be able to maximize my computer power by using an external hard drive to run my ableton live sessions and all of my music files on but it does sometimes lag and sometimes does not load properly when trying to play a certain song. For example, I will launch a clip or series of clips, and one clip may play the first five seconds and then not play at all after that (even though it appears fully loaded). Then later, it will load properly (but only after the crowd stopped dancing while the F@#King song loaded!). I never encountered this problem before I ran off an external hard drive. The other night, I was DJing for a rapper and one of the clips lagged upon launching because of the external and we had to stop the song. Sounded very unprofessional and I really would like to avoid another fail like that. I would like to continue using my external hard drive, but not if it continues to lag, delay, and mess up every now-and-then.

Any tips or suggestions about how to eliminate this lag/delay in using an external hard drive? Or would the best solution would be to (unfortunately) dump all my files back on my internal hard drive?

Thanks...

J5M

[Jackson5Michael]

P.S. I am running Live 8.2.1

[yur2die4]

If you are using mp3 format, it renders that as an uncompressed copy into whatever directory you've chosen in Preferences. That directory has a max limit and then starts replacing rendered files.

Wav and aif work a bit more smoothly, the limitations being their actual size, and the speed of usb.

[Samaritan Sound]

My experience with running Live off an external USB has been abysmal. Could be it was a poorly spec'd drive. Nowadays I run a Glyph off of eSATA, and it's mostly the bomb. I occasionally lose link with the drive (1 out of 6 sessions), but I'm pretty sure it's due to the elcheapo eSATA express card I'm using.

[Jackson5Michael]

Please help... Need a solution that will help me out... Maybe something I can do with the settings in the external hard drive?

[jestermgee]

How many tracks do you have?
How many individual clips do you have loaded?
What format are these clips (MP3 / Wav)?
Where is your Ableton Temp directory stored?
Is your drive a standard USB 2.0 (480MBPs Drive)?

It does sound like the HDD cannot serve audio files quick enough to Ableton or like has been said, the Ableton cache cannot store everything you ask. If you have a live set for performing is your set pre compiled or do you just have loads of songs loaded and you just pick and choose at the time?

For live shows I would ditch that external HDD and just copy what you need for the show onto the PC. When you are done you can delete the project off the HDD. For external drives for performing I would recommend either eSATA/Firewire or USB3 drives as their transfer speed is a LOT faster.