Ableton Forum

Its really too bad that a great program like Live is so I/O bound to the hard-disk for samples when loads of RAM is available (1Gb in my machine).
Here's how this might be solved:
If Live were to simply cache samples in RAM that were used often according to maybe a size theshold setting- lots of RAM disk activity could be alleviated and also allow more simultaneous tracks with slower disks/interface combos (such as ATA drives). I had to switch up to U160 SCSI interface and drive to play more than 12 layers, and that is not cool.
I compose my tracks in Logic Audio with only an ATA drive on an old Mac G4- and it must have some kind of intelligent cache for audio, because I can have loads of audio tracks mixed without a problem.

Thanks guys!

sounds like more of a slow internal hard drive problem then RAM (since you have a gig). I''ve noticed a huge difference in track count between my internal 4,200 RPMon my toshiba satelite laptop, and my external 7,200 RPM firewire 8 MB cache, 8.9 ms seek time drive. Also, as described many times on this site, pcs can handle multiple times the amount of tracks and effects as even the most suped up macs.

Ryan

I hope my information is right,

It is said, they are working on it
(maybe next update)
now that most people have pretty much ram (1gb and more)
there is no speed limit because of drives (especially notebooks)
and no more need for installing other aplications like ramdisk

I hope this rumour becomes reality.

Cheers
Pete

have you considered a RAM disk?

(Where you make a section of ram look like an external drive - there are mac and PC utilities which will do this for you.

-Search forums for more detail.

I would like to see the option to suspend the samples in ram as well. He shouldn't have to even think about a ram disk, it should be built into Live.

In the Live 3 preview they said it can be turned on optionally on a per-track basis. For those of us that use Live more like a DAW than as a looping-live-improvisation tool, it would be great to have a *global* preference to load as much audio as possible into RAM, all the time. Streaming from disk all the time (unless you invest in FireWire disks, or have newer Macs with faster i/o) is a bit too risky for serious audio production.