Ableton Forum

When I create long mixes (hour+), I often end up with live sets with hundreds of tracks, corresponding to different songs, Impulse-backing beats, effects, voice over, etc. I realize I could consolidate a lot of tracks by having a smaller number of tracks with many songs on each, but I would end up with a lot of effects per track and a LOT of automation to handle the volume, panning, effects on/off, etc., so it seems impractical. Splitting up into multiple live sets is not really an option because everything overlaps and there tend to be a lot of reverb/delay trails which would not carry over. I also realize I could probably freeze the tracks, although I'm worried that if I freeze 100 tracks in a 60 minute live set it will take up an exorbitant amount of space... and often I end up going back and tweaking parts of the set, so freezing doesn't seem super practical either. Does anyone have any other tips? In Live 8, performance is pretty pitiful; I am running one of the latest Macbook pros, maxed out (2.3 i7, 8gb ram, SSD), and simple actions can take a long time - for example, adding a track (command-T) takes about 15 seconds. It was not nearly as bad in Live 7. Please help me out if you have ideas! Thanks.

i would say do some major editing .....hundreds of tracks seems like a whole lot of tracks...
render some of those midi tracks or even parts of whole songs down to audio tracks. that will probably help a lot. freezing helps me a lot on the CPU meter as well.
maybe instead of having a whole lot of different effects on hundreds of tracks...maybe have some global effects set up using the sends and returns, you can map to control and change with your midi controller.....just an example...have just one reverb(which i understand are CPU HOGS) and one delay....
yeah man...that is my main advice...do some super editing and rendering.....and globalize your effects....don't have a reverb on every track....just have one reverb.....scale it all down bro.

I don't think you should give up on freezing so easily. You will only have frozen audio where there is actually (non-silent) audio on a track. You have 100 tracks and an hour of music (that's what I call a MIX ) but you don't have 100 hours of audio if you see what I mean.

Something I do often when things get very big is to freeze, resample, manually bounce or consolidate, then drag the original tracks (MIDI or audio with heavy fx) to the brower in a folder that's well-organized, inside the project. That way if I need to "bring something back to life", I just drag it back into the project. That takes a huge load off in some cases, also keeps the project cleaned up a bit.

TBH, there's just no way to work on 100 tracks x 1 hour in Live without having most of those tracks be in the form of simple audio playing back. IMO.

-Luddy

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I'm going to play around with freezing some. I think in future sets I'll go for global effects as well... changing the one I'm working on would be a nightmare.