the tired topic of... disk usage

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homerjsim
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the tired topic of... disk usage

Post by homerjsim » Mon Mar 05, 2007 12:30 am

Hi
After coming back to Live after working on the same machine running some other DAW's I notice how heavy Live 6.0.3 is on the disk usage, just 6-7 tracks get the Disk light going off, and soon thereafter come the pops...

I'm running XP on a 2Ghz machine with RME Multiface, pulling audio off a firewire 7200 rpm disk - this seems a bit piggy on the resource compared to the other apps I've been using.

Is there a Live 6 performace test, or are people still using the Live 5 one? If so I'll try that and see if I'm outside the envelope...

I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, just thought I'd check in on it...

thanks...

ableton lover
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Re: the tired topic of... disk usage

Post by ableton lover » Mon Mar 05, 2007 12:50 am

[quote="homerjsim"]Hi
I notice how heavy Live 6.0.3 is on the disk usage, just 6-7 tracks get the Disk light going off, and soon thereafter come the pops...

I totally agree with you. its kind of annoying.
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nowtime
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Post by nowtime » Mon Mar 05, 2007 1:05 am

just curious, what is your overall latency set to?
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nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Mon Mar 05, 2007 2:37 am

I can run about 50 tracks on my 3-year old laptop.

Most DAWs have their own methods for caching and streaming off the disk. Live lets you choose what to stream off the disk and what to stick into RAM. I'm not saying one is better than the other, only that there is usually a way for Live to make things work...and in this case, it's putting your clips into RAM. Sure that means you need a lot of RAM, but that's the nature of the beast. My recommendation is to put as many of your clips into RAM, and this should allow you to have a lot more tracks. Also, keep in mind that an external drive will likely have a bit more latency in reaction time, so putting clips in RAM will probably ease up on the demand and lower you pops and crackles.

One other thing to try is to see how many tracks you get if you had all your project files on your internal disk.

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