Ableton Forum

How come when live 5 previews clips and what not it eats memory like no ones business? Is there a way to stop this? I started out with 10 gigs of room on my laptop now im already down to 530mb.

do you mean hard drive space? RAM is your systems memory...

try flushing the mp3 cache to clear your hard drive.

yea sorry i meant hard drive space. I do the clear cache option in abletons prefference, and still says i have little room. Is there another way to flush the cache.

are you sure its ableton using all your drive space?

I'd check the documents and settings folders (if your on windows) and see what the ableton folders are taking up as far as space goes...

also see whats laying around in your Ableton TEMP folder(s), which can be found in the same directory as your Decoding Cache folder.

when you record audio or create new audio in an unsaved live set, it puts those audio files in a temp folder until you choose to save a set as "self contained".
when you close the set and it asks to delete temporary audio files, if you choose "No" then it keeps these files in your temp folder(s).

Furthermore, if you are saving alot of your sets as "self contained", and your sets use pre-existing loops and/or samples then you are basically duplicating files. The redundancy ends up using more disk space and before you know it you're almost out of it. So you may need to rethink your organization and archiving procedures for self contained Live Sets.

cheers.

Actually I've nailed it to when i preview songs and or clips of loops or audio in the library it eats up space. I've tried all that but it seems to still be eating up huge amounts of space.

Hi Chikara,

do you use MP3 files? When Live is playing MP3 files it has to decode them firstly and holds the decoded data on the disk.
You can setup up DecodingCache how much memory the DecodingCache should leave free on your disk in the 'Misc' section of the Live preferences.

regards,
Alex

i use mp3 files.....
and i just discover HOW MUCH space does live take..dammit!..
does this space free when ableton is closed?..

ye...just figured out the decoding cache is 2gigs..no way of avoiding that i suppose...

Hi GK,

ye...just figured out the decoding cache is 2gigs..no way of avoiding that i suppose...

Sure you can. You can activate the 'Maximum Cache Size' in the 'Misc' section of Live's preferences and set up a maximal value for the cache.
But keep in mind as smaller the cache is as more often the MP3 file you use again has to be decoded again.

regards,
Alex

yes of course,thats obvious but my hdd spin rate is slow so i cant wait everytime for them to be decoded

..thanks alex

Ok now how would i go about emptying the decode cache considereing my comp still has no space i cant even use ableton at the moment. I hit clear and none of the hard drive space comes back.

Im sure you've thought of this already, but why cant you go into the folder, select all files and hit the 'delete' key?

Ok i go into the folder and there is nothing in it. and yet i still go to preview songs and what not and boom missing files/space. Its like a phantom i tell ya. no files in it and yet ableton is still misplacing hard drive space that i cannot find.

Hi Chikara,

firstly you should provide us with a bit more data about your computer setup.
and the used operating system and which version of Live 5.
Furthermore which is the disk partition where do you have this problem? Is it the system partition? Or the partition where Live is installed?

You say you preview a clip (.alc) or audio file in Live's browser and immediately the it needs space on your disk. Can you give an example how much when you preview one clip?

regards,
Alex