How fast do your Live sets load?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.

How fast do your sets load into Live?

Not over 10 seconds
7
17%
Not over 20 seconds
7
17%
Not over 30 seconds
1
2%
Not over 40 seconds
4
10%
Not over 50 seconds
1
2%
Not over 60 seconds
3
7%
Over 1 minute
9
22%
2 minutes or more
9
22%
 
Total votes: 41

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Wed May 20, 2015 2:48 pm

I have these load times on OS X on a 2.66Ghz Core2Duo with 8gb/1tb SSD (about 250MB/s read):

OS X cold start to desktop (auto login): 10 seconds (includes 15 background processes)
Ableton Live 9.2b9 and 9.1.8 program start to full screen: 15 seconds

That's the factory default set. My personal default set with 11 tracks and 1-3 plug-ins on each takes about 50 seconds to load.

Loading a not very complicated set takes well over a minute. Clearly loading a set takes seemingly an unreasonably long time. How fast do your sets load typically?

Please respond with a platform description and comments as well.
Last edited by Stromkraft on Fri May 22, 2015 9:27 am, edited 4 times in total.
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sonik777
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Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by sonik777 » Wed May 20, 2015 3:29 pm

Asus G750 laptop

windows 8.1

Intel gen 4 i7 4700HQ 4 core mobile processor

Samsung 840 EVO SSD

16 GB ddr3 ram

M-Audio Project MIX I/O firewire interface

Ableton version 9.1.2

Windows cold boot - about 5 seconds

Ableton factory default load about 10 seconds.

I'd say roughly each additional track, and each vst adds about 1 second of load time each.

So for me a project with 20 tracks and 20 vsts would take about 50 seconds.

However the odd part is the times are not always the same. I could load the same project in 50 seconds, completely quite ableton, and load the same project again and it could take 40 or 60 seconds. And sometimes things hang and it takes an additional 20 seconds for some reason.

Also if there is any M4L stuff in a project I best hope and pray it doesn't crash while loading. Such a cool feature but it's pretty much a total crapshoot. Ableton really needs to make convolution reverb a core device. Seriously.

tedlogan
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Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by tedlogan » Wed May 20, 2015 4:39 pm

How strange and unfortunate. I really hope when I upgrade my whole PC, which will include a Samsung 500GB EVO SSD, that my load times aren't as poor as this. I was under the impression that with an SSD, data is accessed and retrieved instantly. Well, at least this is what I read everyone reporting with SSDs - "Windows loads in under 20 seconds, Live/Cubase/Pro-Tools etc projects open immediately"

My avg set takes about the same time to load as what you guys have stated, but is to be expected as I am working on a PC with a 1TB 7200rpm HD that's 6 years old and very cranky.

My sets are usually around 8 tracks or so, a few instances of Hive, Bazille and Zebra, Granulator sometimes, Conv Rev Pro x 2, 6 returns with some delays etc, a handful of Satin instances.

live 9.2b9 (no real diff between this and the general release versions btw for me concerning loading)
Windows 7 home premium 64 bit
6 GB RAM
i7 920 @2.6ghz
WD 7200rpm 1TB hard drive

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Wed May 20, 2015 5:13 pm

tedlogan wrote:
My avg set takes about the same time to load as what you guys have stated, but is to be expected as I am working on a PC with a 1TB 7200rpm HD that's 6 years old and very cranky.
I'm thinking that it's internal Live structures that could be behind the time it takes. Maybe it's hard to cache a song for reading it into Live and be able to work with it? Because the actual data amount isn't that big. Thanks for your input.
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Davo
Posts: 122
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Location: New Zealand

Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by Davo » Wed May 20, 2015 10:35 pm

MacBookPro mid 2014 2.8 GHz 4 cores 16 GB RAM 1TB SSD

My current set (with 8 instances of my max midi generator device, a max midi monitor, drum rack and synth, total of 7 tracks) loads in 7 seconds. I am happy with this. Live only crashes when I am programming Max, which I assume is because I have done something stupid.

19oclock
Posts: 68
Joined: Thu Aug 21, 2014 5:40 pm

Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by 19oclock » Thu May 21, 2015 4:44 am

I bought my Thinkpad for $400 off of eBay. Running 32bit with a 7200rpm drive. Windows 7 and Live 9. Sucker is pretty snappy.

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: How fast does your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Thu May 21, 2015 10:27 pm

Davo wrote:MacBookPro mid 2014 2.8 GHz 4 cores 16 GB RAM 1TB SSD

My current set (with 8 instances of my max midi generator device, a max midi monitor, drum rack and synth, total of 7 tracks) loads in 7 seconds. I am happy with this.
I would be too! This sounds promising for newer machines. Thanks for sharing!
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rasputin
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Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by rasputin » Fri May 22, 2015 12:35 am

I really shouldn't mention this until I do scientific studies, but I am convinced that Live sets load MUCH faster on my PC AFTER the first time I run it. Cacheing? My imagination?

See sig for configuration. Anyone else see these or should I get psychiatric help??
Live 9.1 <> occasionally Reason 4.0.1 <> Reaper.latest! <> Windows 7 on a bespoke Intel Q6600 <> ASUS P5E <> 8GB RAM, M-Audio Delta 2496 and that's it.

Stromkraft
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Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Fri May 22, 2015 9:23 am

rasputin wrote:I really shouldn't mention this until I do scientific studies, but I am convinced that Live sets load MUCH faster on my PC AFTER the first time I run it. Cacheing? My imagination?
Nope, this doesn't seem so, unless it's your hybrid disk that is doing caching from regular HD to SSD. Just do the tests as scientific as can be and share. This thread isn't about speculation. OK?
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TomViolenz
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Joined: Mon Dec 13, 2010 6:19 pm

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by TomViolenz » Fri May 22, 2015 9:34 am

I picked more than 2 min, but that is no surprise as my Live set is HUGE, and it only needs to be done once after Live crashes (since I never close Live otherwise :mrgreen: )

But what bothers me much more is that with this set, which contains very complicated routings and MANY plug-ins, many other things are extremely sluggish.
Connecting/disconnecting a Midi controller? Make that another 2-3 min.
Adding a new device/track? Yup 1-2 min more.
Changing the interface? Time to make a coffee.

It's like the 90s never ended :x

(MBPro 2012 i7, SSD, 16 gigs Ram, Mavericks)

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Fri May 22, 2015 10:56 am

TomViolenz wrote:what bothers me much more is that with this set, which contains very complicated routings and MANY plug-ins, many other things are extremely sluggish.
Connecting/disconnecting a Midi controller? Make that another 2-3 min.
Adding a new device/track? Yup 1-2 min more.
Changing the interface? Time to make a coffee.

It's like the 90s never ended :x

(MBPro 2012 i7, SSD, 16 gigs Ram, Mavericks)
Hmm, I think this lends the idea that internal structures adds some inertia a degree of credibility. Maybe this is an area where Ableton have had to make compromises that are hard to abandon?
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timday
Posts: 569
Joined: Mon May 04, 2009 1:02 pm

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by timday » Fri May 22, 2015 11:15 am

Isn't the 9.2 release supposed to provide faster load times?

TomViolenz
Posts: 6854
Joined: Mon Dec 13, 2010 6:19 pm

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by TomViolenz » Fri May 22, 2015 11:20 am

Stromkraft wrote:
TomViolenz wrote:what bothers me much more is that with this set, which contains very complicated routings and MANY plug-ins, many other things are extremely sluggish.
Connecting/disconnecting a Midi controller? Make that another 2-3 min.
Adding a new device/track? Yup 1-2 min more.
Changing the interface? Time to make a coffee.

It's like the 90s never ended :x

(MBPro 2012 i7, SSD, 16 gigs Ram, Mavericks)
Hmm, I think this lends the idea that internal structures adds some inertia a degree of credibility. Maybe this is an area where Ableton have had to make compromises that are hard to abandon?
But even if?! Some additional overhead I can understand, but my numbers are not hyperbole, they are real! Meaning: How can the calculations to add a track/device or connect/diconnect Midi controllers take THAT long?! I mean this is a quadcore i7 with a SSD and 16gigs of Ram, not a C64 with 64k Ram and a cassete tape drive for programs :x

musikmachine
Posts: 628
Joined: Wed Aug 05, 2009 12:56 am

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by musikmachine » Fri May 22, 2015 1:48 pm

I've experienced nothing like the load times of devices, pretty fast overall. Projects take about a minute but i'm running about 30-40 tracks with plugins like Monark and synth squad, lots of fx and 7 sends.

Slowest thing is the rendering, takes a while, about 5-10 minutes. I'm long overdue an SSD but specs are AMD FX8320 at 4.5ghz, 8GB 1600 DDR Ram, Seagate 7200rpm SATA drive.

Samples, projects and the user library are all kept on seperate partitions.

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: How fast do your Live sets load?

Post by Stromkraft » Fri May 22, 2015 3:21 pm

TomViolenz wrote: But even if?! Some additional overhead I can understand, but my numbers are not hyperbole, they are real! Meaning: How can the calculations to add a track/device or connect/diconnect Midi controllers take THAT long?! I mean this is a quadcore i7 with a SSD and 16gigs of Ram, not a C64 with 64k Ram and a cassete tape drive for programs :x
Considering what Live can calculate in real time it's something of a mystery. But as Live up til recently they supported multiple versions of two really old OSes as well as new with two versions of Live (8 and 9) we could suspect there are probably some old coding debts Ableton must pay to be able to pull that off. Even 2 years ago it was really rare for anyone to support OS X 10.5 and to some extent even Windows XP. When Ableton abandoned these they hopefully bought themselves some freedom from old structures and libraries. Hopefully future versions of Live will show if this can make a difference or not.
Last edited by Stromkraft on Fri May 22, 2015 3:44 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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