When my arrange view looks like this...

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:01 pm

nebulae wrote:Along those lines, the drawing of waveforms only occurs once. In Sonar, Cubase, and in Live's ASD files, the waveform is stored.

How do you know that it's stored there? I'm not sure that it is. Moving warp markers changes how the waveform is displayed in arrange tracks...

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:23 pm

i've struggled with this same problem too. audio file accessing isn't the problem, and i'm not so sure its graphic redraw/processing related either. the graphic redraw problems seem to be a result of something else, along with lag in reactions to mouse movements, keystrokes, etc. beyond what we see via the cpu meter or how the screen redraws, there's plenty of other background stuff going on that could really mess things up...like what's going on when you copy/paste 1000 edits? i remember reading once about one of the problems with os 9 being that the system would do absolutely nothing if you held the mouse button down...that all processes were held up waiting to see what the mouse click would do. that's what i'm reminded of...its like the system stops doing other things as it struggles to keep track of all the tiny bits of information. this was a problem with the first version of spotlight...it would start searching as soon as you typed a single letter with the result being that the system would stall on the remainder of your keystrokes as it sifted through 100,000,000 results for the letter 's'. there's no user-end fix, i wish ableton would at least explain why its a problem and whether it can be fixed.

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:44 pm

noisetonepause wrote:
nebulae wrote:Along those lines, the drawing of waveforms only occurs once. In Sonar, Cubase, and in Live's ASD files, the waveform is stored.
How do you know that it's stored there? I'm not sure that it is. Moving warp markers changes how the waveform is displayed in arrange tracks...

Yeah, that's a good point. It's just that when you drop in a file, the waveform is created, and then if you drop the file again, and it has an associated .asd file, the waveform isn't redrawn, so I assumed the waveform was stored in there. But since we have NO OFFICIAL COMMENT, we can just talk on and on and ok. Who knows...maybe it's the modem driver in my laptop that's affecting the Live graphics performance.

LOFA · Post by **LOFA** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:48 pm

Tarekith wrote:
reax wrote:There an mp3 of your song somewhere? Just curious what an arrangement like that sounds like.
http://tarekith.com/mp3s/Amethyst.zip

I really enjoy this track.

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:51 pm

Thanks! At least somethign is coming out of this mess I've created (again).

ikke · Post by **ikke** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:56 pm

are you guys using live6? cause i have no problems whatsoever with version 6.0.1. WIth live 5 i had those problems too. which gfx cards are you using? DOes it have enough video RAM? i have an ATI Radeon with 256mb, recommended by Digidesign to work with pro tools. i never had a single problem. Matrox gave me a lot of problems though..

Also, you need to defragment your hard disks often. at least once a week. Even if Windows gives you the message that "this disk doesnt need to be defragmented" after youve analysed it.. XP is full of it cause you DO need to defragment! it helps for performance, it prevents hickups and slow screen redraws.
Good luck and update to version 6.0.1 asap! leave 6.0.3 for what it is. it fixed a few bugs (i didnt knew about) but it added a lot of new more important bugs (render, performance issues)

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 11:02 pm

Can you talk more about the 6.03 bugs? I didn't know there were a lot introduced.

The first bug I came across was yesterday, when dropping in 32-bit files and getting white noise. Ouch.

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 1:38 am

scientist wrote:i remember reading once about one of the problems with os 9 being that the system would do absolutely nothing if you held the mouse button down...that all processes were held up waiting to see what the mouse click would do.

That was back when it was single-tasking (System 6 and below, possibly System 7; It was a lot better by MacOS

. The story is in the excellent essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line; a single-tasking OS cannot "walk and chew gum at the same time", so when you're asking it to draw a menu, it can't keep up a network connection at the same time. Due to a series of unfortunate bugs in Apple's networking software at the time, if a client dropped connection the whole thing would crash. If a user held a menu open for long enough to make his computer drop connection (ie., long enough for it not to send out its periodic "I'm still here" signal to the host), the network would go down.

I don't think this is related to that.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:04 am

I don't generally have problems myself, but then again neither do I generally do this mega-edit style of composing.

One thing that has always worried me though, about the possiblity of this being a video drawing problem, is how the waveform renderings seem to "shimmer" or "shudder" when you're recording something. I'm always thinking "that part's already drawn, and it's in the past!! Stop changing it!!"

signal · Post by **signal** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:56 am

I also get unacceptably slow (3-8 sec.) lag times when trying to move/edit anything as my Arrange views begin to look like the example posted upthread. Unfortunately, I do my heavy editing in Session and it happens there as well if...

1. I have multiple tracks each containing a rack of multiple Impulse/Simpler instances

2. Use a lot of empty tracks solely for submixing and routing via the IO menu.

(Forget about combining these two situations.)

This can happen with no FX and very few clips. With CPU at <10% and a 7200 HD, the only thing that I should be burdening is my 2gigs of RAM. But, of this, only 50-60% max is in use.

This has been the case for me since Live 4 on three different PC's. It may be slightly better in 6, but not much.

The fact that it occurs in both Arrange and Session leads me to think that the lagging issue is larger than just a video problem, although that may be contributing as well.

Like some of you, I'm not looking for temporary workarounds to minimize the problem. I know how to use Live and make the best of things. It's just too bad that I'm not able to take full advantage of some of Live's more interesting features ie Impulse/Simpler presets via Racks and extensive internal track routing.

reax · Post by **reax** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 7:00 am

Tarekith wrote:Thanks! At least somethign is coming out of this mess I've created (again).

Listened to your track yesterday and was about to comment on how much I liked it when my boss dropped by my cube to see how things were going.

Anyways... really great track. The overly complex arrangement was certainly worth it.

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 1:39 pm

Overly complex huh?

vdrum · Post by **vdrum** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:34 pm

Maybe a faster external HD??

Check OSX Activity Monitor just to get a visual on RAM and CPU use?

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:42 pm

This thread is getting long enough that no one is reading the whole thing now before replying.

To summarize:

- Total project is less than 200MB

- ALL audio tracks are loaded into RAM, thus removing the HD from the equation. Even when I was using the sample off disk, disk activity was very low.

- Using menumeters, I can clearly see that my CPU, disk, and RAM usuage are very, very low. CPU is between 10-18%, only using 390MB of my 2GB of RAM.

- Freezing all the tracks, or collapsing them, has no effect what so ever.

- I can run similarly complex projects in cubase SX, via Parallels and it works fine. surely if I can do it smoothly in a virtualized OS, it should be possible natively.

Finally, all of my testing is showing me that this issue is NOT due to any sort of limitations of my computer (brand new Mac Book Pro, core 2 duo, 2.16gHz, 2GB RAM, 5400rpm drive). At no time do ANY of my system meters (disk, cpu, ram) come anywhere even close to 20% utilization.

And to reiterate, it's not like this is keeping me from getting things done, or not working at all. It's just a minor slow down when saving and zooming/navigating.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:48 pm

Did you try consolidating the tracks yet?

When my arrange view looks like this...

Just to throw another spanner in the works...