Ableton Forum

Hi,

I'll try to give as much context as I can. I work at a church and purchase backing tracks from MultiTracks.com. I save the songs/files on an external hard drive and always use that when creating new sets. The past couple months, my computer has been running extremely slowly when loading and editing tracks. I usually will open a blank session and name it with the date of the upcoming service. I'll then copy/paste each song's tracks into the session in the order I want. I then collect all and save (so that set gets saved to the computer).

However, as I have been creating these sets the past few months, it takes a significant amount of time for my computer to buffer even one song's worth of files. Then, when I copy those files, I get the spinning wheel of death for about 10 seconds before I can move on. Opening the full set then takes a lot of time to buffer, and the manipulating the tracks within the set (moving them, warping them, fading them, any action at all) all causes the spinning wheel to come up.

I've been doing this for years and this have never been an issue before. I have a ton of space on my hard drive, my ram is fine when I have the sets open and running, I've updated and re downloaded the program multiple times. I'm not sure what else to do. This is making my workflow extremely inefficient. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

hi there, your post is missing important information. at minimum it would be helpful to include specific details about your computer system: model, year, operating system, audio interface, Live version, etc...

are you having lag issues with anything else on the computer, or just with Live?

Hi, sorry.

I'm on a 2019 MacBook Pro running the Ventura 13.4.1 OS. I'm running the most up-to-date version of Live 11 Standard, and do not use an audio interface. As of right now, the primary purpose of the program in our organization is to edit the tracks we purchase from 3rd party sources and run them during our live services.

There are no other performance issues with the computer. I've been keeping an eye on my Activity Monitor to see if there are any issues that come up elsewhere, but even when I'm encountering these Issues on Ableton, the Activity Monitor still looks normal.

Hopefully that gives you more context.

There was an issue with previous L11.3 versions that could cause this, but it is solved in L11.3.10, so first thing would be to make sure you're running this build.

Do you cut those tracks, or do you just load them as is for playback?

I am currently on the most up to date version--I was hoping from the patch notes that my issues would get resolved but they've persisted.

On my external hard drive, I have a folder for each song. Within that folder is the original, and usually a few different versions with different cuts for whatever arrangement best fits what I'm trying to do. I then copy those tracks (when one of said issues arises), and then paste them into the master set list for the week. I'll usually have to do a little bit of cutting/tweaking within that master set though, depending on transitions between songs.

Hope that's helpful.

Does this happen when you load projects from the internal HD and not an external one?

I'm not sure--I don't keep any of the files on the computer itself for the sake of space. I can look into trying that though!

It might help narrowing down the issue.

I took all of my song projects and copied them to my internal HD and tried creating my master project that way, but I still encountered the same exact issues.

It was a good thought though!

are you using any third-party plug-ins?

No, I'm not.

I'm in the same boat.
Following for more updates.

A contact of mine who uses the program really in-depth for his studio is going to come by sometime this week to see if he can figure anything out.

I'll update if we find some sort of solution.

I still haven't been able to find a solution for this problem, just dealing with it currently.

I did happen to check my Activity Monitor while copying a track and waiting for the computer to complete the command. When I opened up Activity Monitor, is said Ableton was using 102.4% of my computer's CPU. When the spinning wheel goes away and tracks get copied, its usage goes back down to the usual 7-10%. Anything coming to kind as to how I can fix this issue? (keep in mind the CPU meter on Ableton itself doesn't go up).

Thanks.