Windows Memory Constraints

thelectronichild · Post by **thelectronichild** » Wed May 14, 2008 6:34 pm

So here I am torn between the ability to use the full 4GB of memory I have on my box with an x64 bit windows platform and run into VST compatibility issues

.....or.....run 32bit and only have access to 2GB of memory with all VST's working marvelously (except for the part where I run out of memory). Has anyone found a happy medium to this issue? Any and all comments, ideas, thoughts...etc are welcome, thanks!

darkcatt · Post by **darkcatt** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:26 pm

try freezing some tracks!

I know that sounds like a BS answer but it works for me

thelectronichild · Post by **thelectronichild** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:39 pm

darkcatt - thanks for the post! thats actually a good idea and I have been doing that as a band-aid to squeeze maybe one more vst out of the system but its still not enough for what I need - hmmm just thought of this idea....installing ableton under x64 and perhaps run each vst in compatibility mode... thoughts?

darkcatt · Post by **darkcatt** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:42 pm

if you are repeating the same effects / vsts you can put them on an empty channel and use it as an effects bus.

Another alt is to see what Vista compatability looks like on those same VST's. ( I don't use vista, but it is an option)

I only have 1.5 gigs of ram on my lappie and an 80 gig hard drive so I have been forced to get really creative

adventurepants_ · Post by **adventurepants_** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:53 pm

XP32 will address up to 3.5gb ram. should be plenty for most anyone with a fast cpu.

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Thu May 15, 2008 12:04 am

I have huge livesets with loads of tracks and plugins with 2GB memory and got by quite well on 1GB. Track freezing and/or occasional rendering out of a CPU intensive vsti helps enormously.

davec1 · Post by **davec1** » Thu May 15, 2008 10:06 am

I haven't tried it myself, but from what I've read on forums, the /3GB switch works very well on 32bit systems and lets applications use more ram (up to 3.5 GB, I think). (just google 3GB switch).

in order to benefit from that, the applications you run (i.e. the host if you're running vsts) needs to be "large address aware". I'm not sure if Live does that.

if it doesn't, there's a tool to make programms large address aware that's called laatido that seems to work for most people.

none of this is my own experience, but what I've read on film music composer's forums (they need tons of RAM for orchestral sample libraries).

Personally, I'm getting a win xp64 machine next week, hopefully, with 8GB of RAM. Unfortunately neither cubase studio 4 nor live 7 are 64bit, but there's a few other tricks to still benefit from the large ram (such as running sample players in standalone and looping the audio back into the DAW, or running fx teleport both as host and as slave on the same machine).

blank · Post by **blank** » Thu May 15, 2008 11:39 am

adventurepants_ wrote:XP32 will address up to 3.5gb ram. should be plenty for most anyone with a fast cpu.

+1

except it's 3.2 max

even with the /3gb boot switvh

thelectronichild · Post by **thelectronichild** » Thu May 15, 2008 5:37 pm

I run some pretty memory intensive vst's such as symphonic choirs/orch, quantum leap quantum leap colossus etc....some of these guys take up 1.2-1.5GB of memory alone for one sample loaded so I need as much memory as possible

The good thing about the vst's is they run as a separate thread allowing them to allocate memory independently from ableton - Thanks to all that took the time to post, much appreciated -

davec1 · Post by **davec1** » Thu May 15, 2008 6:59 pm

thelectronichild wrote: The good thing about the vst's is they run as a separate thread allowing them to allocate memory independently from ableton

Do you mean you run them in standalone mode outside of live? because I'm almost completely certain that if you run them as vsts in ableton live there's one GB/application cap that will apply to the sum of live and whatever is running in it (ergo 3.5GB for everything together, if /3GB switch and LAA host)...

have you checked the east-west forums? http://www.soundsonline-forums.com

bosonHavoc · Post by **bosonHavoc** » Thu May 15, 2008 7:05 pm

you ever think of setting up another computer to run some of those big vsti?

Silence · Post by **Silence** » Thu May 15, 2008 7:10 pm

this is gonna sound totally fanboy-ish but why dont u consider OSX?

just curious about benifits and such?...not intended to start a flamewar

...I REPEAT!!! NO FLAME!!!

other then that....i dont think vista would make a diffirence...would it?

thelectronichild · Post by **thelectronichild** » Thu May 15, 2008 10:02 pm

Silence: I have considered mac but unfortunately its not in my budget at the moment as I just bought a new car

bosonHavoc: how would I be able to control the vst's on a separate machine and still be able to access/control them from the primary machine? Is this something I would be able to do via a network? I haven't looked into running this over a network but if so I would absolutely love to attach my NAS which have 14 320 SCSI 15K drives.....load time would be blazing fast - ideas?

thelectronichild · Post by **thelectronichild** » Thu May 15, 2008 10:13 pm

davec1: yes I am sure as when I open ableton and load a vst I have it configured to load the plugin independent from ableton yet still interface with the application via midi - ableton uses roughly 150MB of memory and (I'll use symphonic choir in this example) the VST chomps up 1.4GB of memory and runs as its own thread - that was actually one of my concerns going into this was wondering how windows will treat the vst...will it allocate the memory needed through ableton since I load the plugin through the app or will it spark a new process and dish out the necessary memory needed...luckily it was the later of the two

adventurepants_ · Post by **adventurepants_** » Thu May 15, 2008 10:20 pm

blank wrote:
adventurepants_ wrote:XP32 will address up to 3.5gb ram. should be plenty for most anyone with a fast cpu.
+1

except it's 3.2 max

even with the /3gb boot switvh

There's a 2GB max of per-process user-mode address space, but the system as a whole can handle 4GB of memory. PCI cards will eat up some of the address space, so it will never report 4gb. Mine reports 3.5 and ive seen some that report 3.75gb.