Loading Times

[Ku77er]

Up until a week ago I thought I had a lot of trouble with loading large ableton projects that I was working on. I thought it was crashing, heres why:

Literally hundreds of times over the last few years I have loaded large and small projects, sometimes even the large ones load quickly, sometimes they take a bit longer.
Yet OFTEN, a project will 'seemingly' not load at all. I wait and wait.. upwards of 3 or 4 minutes (they would normally open WAY before this)

About a week ago, I was sat waiting for an age for a project to load in, just about to CTRL ALT DELETE and theres a knock at my front door.

I'm gone 10 minutes, when I return... Project loaded, and fine.

Testing over the last week has shown that SOMETIMES a large project can take upwards of 10 minutes to load. Yet other times (and yes this is on first turn on in the morning) it can take 30 seconds to a minute.

This is probably a case for tech support but I thought I would post here to see if anyone else has this kind of issue?

Why would it take tens of minutes, and then at other times (for the same project) a minute?

Kutter

[Stromkraft]

Up until a week ago I thought I had a lot of trouble with loading large ableton projects that I was working on.
...

Why would it take tens of minutes, and then at other times (for the same project) a minute?

Poll: How fast do your Live sets load?.

There could be many reasons. In your case it sounds like messy projects, full disks or files on external disks. 10 minutes one time and 1 another is not normal unless you change a lot between sessions.

[micksmuse]

since 9.2 updated on my computer i have been in load hell. sometimes it takes almost 15 minutes to start working properly. sometimes shows completely loaded and all hell breaks loose when you try to play or record on the file.
after it finally settles down back to normal.
never had these issues till 9.2

good computer and plenty of file space.

[Stromkraft]

since 9.2 updated on my computer i have been in load hell. sometimes it takes almost 15 minutes to start working properly.

What does "start working properly" mean here?
I noticed no difference at no point when updating to 9.2 including the betas. I seldom have more than 30 tracks and of those 10 are for my Tremor drum machine and a handful of aux'es/busses. 4 returns and 3-10 plug-ins on the channel strips and maybe 5-6 on the master buss. Loading a project never takes more than 90 seconds. Which is too much really. 30 seconds is barely acceptable.

It's not 15 minutes to load though. How are your projects structured?

all hell breaks loose when you try to play or record on the file.
after it finally settles down back to normal.

This does not sound related to load times. Can you please give some more details?

[Ku77er]

My tracks are not even that complicated.

I sit here replying to this thread while waiting on the loading of a Live Set... It's been 2 minutes so far.

My Lives sets do get fairly weighty when it comes to messyness, my friend and I 'jam' a lot and ditch a lot of material that stays in the project folder.

That said, the current project (the one i'm waiting on) is around 500 meg, so not amazingly huge.

It has 14 tracks, 3 - 5 inserts, 4 sends, No master processing (yet).

My machine is an I7 4970 @4GHZ, 32GB Ram, 2 SSD's (the current project is on an IDE however - we move cleaned up projects to SSD when we are done) and I'm using Suite.

My machine should EASILY handle this yet this EXACT project too 30 seconds to load last night (on a fresh boot) and todat I'm up to about 5 minutes.

SOMETHING is not right, but I have no idea what or how to even think about fixing it.

Kutter

[Stromkraft]

It has 14 tracks, 3 - 5 inserts, 4 sends, No master processing (yet).

My machine is an I7 4970 @4GHZ, 32GB Ram, 2 SSD's (the current project is on an IDE however - we move cleaned up projects to SSD when we are done) and I'm using Suite.

How much free space on disks? An IDE can be quite slow, so should test with an SSD as well to see if that makes a difference.

Are you mixing together multiple songs in one project? That's probably not a good idea.
If you are, then one project can be cleaned up a bit by re-saving under a new name, when outside the old project and then do a Collect all and save. This have rescued multiple projects for me that were in that state. We usually have hours of recording in my collaboration too, so that in itself shouldn't make it take that long for loading.

[Ku77er]

It's a 1TB drive with round 400GB on it.


The ssd makes NO difference. I have noticed a couple of things since I last posted.

Firstly, when a project takes ages to load the hard drive light pulses once or twice every few seconds.

Those SAME projects when they load properly the hard drive light just stays on, as you would imagine it to.

Secondly, My Waves plugins... I have 2 projects where the Waves logo pops up almost immediately on clicking 'load' IF that happens the project loads in under a minute.

If I click load and the waves logo does not pop up (take over the cursor) within the first few seconds of loading, then I know it will take forever to load.

Not saying this is a Waves issue.. Just stuff i'm noticing while trying to understand this issue.

[Stromkraft]

Secondly, My Waves plugins... I have 2 projects where the Waves logo pops up almost immediately on clicking 'load' IF that happens the project loads in under a minute.

If I click load and the waves logo does not pop up (take over the cursor) within the first few seconds of loading, then I know it will take forever to load.

Not saying this is a Waves issue.. Just stuff i'm noticing while trying to understand this issue.

Just a long shot: Do you have any Waves plug-ins added to your default template that is the project that Live opens with when started? There's an odd bug that prevents proper functionality if there are any in the template. There are no issues, except for no support for side-chaining (Update: Since 2016 Waves support routed signals for side-chaining), with Waves in the actual projects, just the default template.

And also, Waves do not support AU in Live. So always use the VST version unless there's a specific reason.

[Ku77er]

Thanks for your input Storm but sadly no I dont use any templates at all.

Feels so much better that people are helping me discuss this though, it's greatly appreciated.

Kutter