Ableton Forum

I'm working on a track that is causing Ableton to take forever to load and I'm wondering what I might do to alleviate the issue.
This is only happening on one given song and I suspect it's because there's a lot of processed vocals.

Here's the scenario...

I have some vocal tracks that I've sliced-n-diced to achieve a stutter effect in places and am wondering if that could be the issue?
ie, say if each individual slice needs to load the entire waveform into memory...

Further, these tracks are Autotuned (not to a noticeable degree, but still, that's processor) and there's nearly 20 tracks of vocals
altogether. Ok, so yea, I realize most people will find that excessive, but in actuality, it does work.

So, I went ahead and recorded the different sections and did my slicing... and am wondering if I crop down each slice to only what is played, will
that give me a boost in load-time or would that only count at play time...or would it even matter? If so, is there a way to "crop everything in place"?

I'm was also having trouble with the CPU spiking and therefore choking up playback, but I froze 6 of the meatier tracks and that is now under control.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what tweaks I might try to get some extra performance (especially with the super slow load-time of Ableton on this particular track.)
I know it will be easiest to tell me to just lose some of the vocals, but this isn't an option, unfortunately...

Any tips are greatly appreciated, thanks!

Couple options here that I suppose would help. First of all, with 20 vocal tracks, are you using spererate effects processing for each track? or are you using sends? For sound-based fx like reverb, delay, etc. it would make a big difference in cpu usage if you were using sends instead of say the same reverb copied 20 times on each track

Second, I am not sure if each sample has to load the whole wav each time say, a cropped section is loaded, (even if the actual waveform is not cropped.) I was under the impression that Live just references the waveform if it is copied a bunch of times BUT if you have altered the waveform other than slicing it up, it will load that new one also, so that could have an effect on load time.

You might try highlighting a bunch of slices on one track (in arrangement view) and right clicking and consolidating (or ctrl-j/command-j). This basically crops the file in place, and makes it one lumped clip, for however many bars you highlight. Gaps in the track would just get bounced to 0db. HOWEVER, this does normalize the section that you consolidate so you may lose some transients this way. Use your ears though, and if it sounds fine don't think twice about it. You can then drag that clip back into session view if you want to continue arranging there. I am not sure how Live handles samples internally, but you could try this and see if it cuts down on load time.

Other than that, if you are using a sample based midi instrument like a string collection or something, these always jump up my load time considerably, so you may want to actually record the track to an audio track and then delete the collection you were using. This can be a pain if you are altering the clips a lot, but if you know a part is here to stay, you might as well bounce it to an audio track and just use that. You could also try this for the vocal clips, record one, or even a few (or all!) of them internally to an audio track, this will essentially do the same thing as consolidate, but you could technically consolidate severl audio tracks down to one this way.

Anyways, hope this helps, if you have any more questions feel free to ask, I slice audio samples, especially vox quite a bit.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I'm using a send for the reverb (the only effect that is consistent across tracks.)

Good point regarding the reloading of wavs. In fact, some of the slices are affected (not FX'd) with a slight pitch shifts,
so that could be an issue. I will have to look deeper into this.

I did consolidate quite a few of the slices and I definitely like that ability, but it's a essentially a destructive edit,
so I try to steer clear, if possible. Consolidating did seem to help earlier in the process, but now I've "lost" some of
the audio I'd wanted to keep. My own bad. lol. Also, due to the normalizing you mentioned, I did lose quite a few pieces of
"gold" in the process. Lesson learned!

There are very few sample-based sounds in my tracks, so I can't get much savings there...drums and vocals tend to be the only
wavs that I use; virtually everything is based on Operator (love that thing!)

To fix this particular song, I ended up rendering all the chorus vocals (5 tracks worth.) This saved me 5 calls to each of
Utility, Compressor, Autotune, Chorus and Delay -- for a grand total of 25 less effect instantiations. CPU is back down
around 65% and no choking on playback. Winning!

Come to think of it, I do have one more question you may be able to help with regarding creating a Live Pack. I'd like to
make a live pack out of a song and be able to distribute it for remixing/learning purposes. The question is: when a live pack
is created, does *that* crop the samples down to only what's needed for the track? That would be ideal since that way I could
send a live pack that is more lightweight AND doesn't include any ass-sounding vocal parts that didn't make it into the final mix.

I REALLY appreciate your suggestions and time, thank you!

Hey man, glad you got it worked out. As for the Live Pack, I honestly do not know how Live handles wav samples in sets, and I am not sure if it is mentioned in the manual either. Your other option could be to "save as" an additional live set (song.2 or whatever) and then consolidate that down yourself, editing out all the scratchwork and parts you don't need, thus giving you a file specifically for sending the pack to other people without affecting your original.

Cheers

Thanks... I will have to try exporting a live pack and see what it includes/excludes. I also didn't find it in the manual.

So, I created a Live Pack to test with and it seems that even cropping a waveform down before creating the pack does not delete the portions of audio that are not played.

I opened a dedicated thread to ask for pointers and advice, if you're interested to follow.

Thanks again for your time!

Could this be because the live set is still referencing the wav that is on your computer? What if you open the set on another machine?