Ableton Forum

So I got a multitrack project from a friend. All audio. Around 50 tracks in it and it's a 5 minute song.
Consolidated each section (Verse, Chorus, Etc) to new scene in session view. Deleted all the original tracks from arrangement view. Went in to session view and deleted all unnecessary clips (clips that were silent as the guitar or vocals on that track were only happening in the verse or chorus or whatever).
Slimmed the whole thing down as much as possible. There must be maybe 250 clips in the session view. Arrangement view is empty.
One song broken down with one scene per section across 50 tracks.
It's unplayable. CPU spikes to 150% and the thing glitches completely.

Is this my old laptop giving up the ghost or does nobody have that many tracks and clips in a project? Seems like it shouldn't be a big deal. There's no FX on anything. And no midi. It's all audio.

Any help much appreciated.

Hmmm, that sounds odd, mate. I'm wondering if it's something to do with session view versus arrangement view, maybe? I've done something similar to you, but everything in arrangement view I the only crazy thing I remember was the file size (which makes sense since I had 30 or 40 audio tracks).

I'm curious, 250 clips does sound like a lot to manage in session view. You guys playing it live or something?

Sorry I don't have an answer for you - curious what's going on, though.

Yeah, I'm setting it up for her to play live. To be able to trigger the separate parts on stage and have a bit more control and flexibility than the current setup of backing tracks.
But I was hoping to be putting a whole live set together. It's not gonna work if just playing that much audio in one track is causing the cpu problems I'm having.

tigali wrote:There must be maybe 250 clips in the session view. Arrangement view is empty.
One song broken down with one scene per section across 50 tracks.
It's unplayable. CPU spikes to 150% and the thing glitches completely.
…
There's no FX on anything. And no midi. It's all audio.

What warping are you using? Do you really need that on? That's all I can think that would use a lot of CPU here.

What is unplayable? One clip? Two? You need to research this deeper.

A lot of Complex Pro warping being turned on is my guess too.

Tarekith wrote:A lot of Complex Pro warping being turned on is my guess too.

Bang on the money Tarekith (kudos to Stromkraft too!). Thanks. I will adjust and try again. Didn't realise I had changed it to default warp using complex and each audio clip is causing the CPU to jump by 5-10%. I'll report back tomorrow once I've had the chance to work on it.
Thanks.

also, i think that removing unneeded stop buttons is still a good thing.

Flash drive or SSD might make accessing the files faster.

The warp mode tip is probably the best one.

If you have like 16 gigs of ram, you can try committing a few of the bigger clips to ram. Or do the opposite. A bunch of the smaller ones.