How much RAM do I need for a smooth operation on Live ?

[tvoismo]

I just bought myself a Mac Pro 4 Core, but It only comes with 12 gig ram. How much RAM do I actually need for like a 20-30 tracks song ?

Is 16 enough or would you guys go for 32 gig ?

[yur2die4]

What's in your tracks? Samplers? Synths? Audio clips? Midi clips? Mostly session or arrangement view? Live mixing performance or sit down production/arrangement?

[tvoismo]

What's in your tracks? Samplers? Synths? Audio clips? Midi clips? Mostly session or arrangement view? Live mixing performance or sit down production/arrangement?

The easy answer here is "Yes" ..

I use all the things you just said.

[fishmonkey]

if you already have the computer, it's pretty easy to figure out, by using the Activity Monitor to track memory usage.

note that it is not the amount of free memory that is important. the critical measure is the memory pressure. if the memory pressure is high then your Mac will start shuffling the contents of physical RAM to the solid state drive (using swap space as slower virtual RAM).

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201464

the reason why the amount of free memory is not a useful metric is because under the hood OS X uses free memory as disk cache.

anyway, having more than 12 GB of RAM will only be of benefit to Live if you work a lot with large multisampled libraries...