Audio Dropouts - External Drive Necessary?

[jjlucash]

I have a short song that, so far, has eleven midi tracks. Certain parts of the song play as it should, but the audio drops out during certain parts. I know about the meter at the top right of the window, and I know that this (the meter maxing out close to 100%) is happening because certain sounds and effects use much of my laptop's resources.

This is my system info:

I have 28G of free space on my laptop, and I wanted to know if working off of an external drive would improve performance, or if this is something that I can fix by altering Ableton's settings?

[longjohns]

your cpu and ram are going to severely limit what you can get out of live. i think that technically you don't even meet minimum spec (=1.5g celeron) and most people would agree that the minimum spec is too minimum

with midi tracks it's more about cpu than hard drive. try to keep the cpu meter at 60% or less

freeze some tracks - that will create audio files instead of processing the midi tracks real-time

[Budbertzerofluff]

Working with Live 8 on a 1.67Ghz PowerBook, I've had to learn to basically freeze any track I wasn't working on. More specifically when my CPU starts to peg over 60-70% I go in and freeze tracks I'm not working on. Thankfully "unfreezing" is instantaneous.

It's amazing what you can do on a low-spec system as long as you can deal with the "freeze time".

[jjlucash]

How do I freeze tracks? Is this the same as muting (clicking the track number so that it's no longer yellow)?

[8O]

How do I freeze tracks? Is this the same as muting (clicking the track number so that it's no longer yellow)?

Edit menu -> Freeze

[jjlucash]

Thank y'all so much!