playing Live

[mbucc]

Hello everybody
I'm going to be using Live for a performance in couple weeks and have a few questions. I play keyboards in rock/pop cover band which necessitates having different sounds/configurations for each song. Within Live I record-enable multiple tracks and assign sounds to different portions of my keyboards using Instrument racks. For each song I have a different Live set, and these sets are grouped into one Project folder.
with this configuration when I go from song(set) to song(set) there's bit more of a lag than Id like, not to mention if it asks me to save if I've changed a little thing here or there. Is there a better way to do this? also is there a way to lock a set so that I'm not asked to save everytime?

last thing; right now in rehearsal I plug in right from my laptop headphone out into our mixer. do I need some kind of direct box for the performance?

thanks.

equipment: Macbook Pro Os 10.5.6 2.16 Ghz 2GB RAM, Live 8.0.3, M-Audio Axiom 25, Yamaha DS55

[4.33]

using the instrument rack you can also keep multiple copies of your vsti and presets and switch between then using the chain selector (midi mappable)

keeping all this on 1-2 channels you can merge all your sets into one

[TroyP]

I put all the songs in one set. Just use the first few tracks for song 1, the next few for song 2, etc. It requires a bit of side-to-side scrolling, but I've had up to 18 songs in one set this way.

If the processing slows down because of this, render each songs as much as possible (say, everything except VSTs you're playing live) so you have less processing going on for each.

[EddieJ]

If you keep an empty MIDI track available, you can drag the entire new set into the running set. Simply drag the set into the empty track, and Live will automatically create new tracks to fit whatever was in your running set. Then, using shift select, once you're in the new set, delete all the tracks from the last one. You'll be left with just the tracks you need for your current set.
In order to make this work most efficiently, each set should have an empty midi track that will be dragged in with it.