Ableton Forum

I have a stock blackbook, with just 512 ram, but im getting audio drop
outs with just 3 or 4 loops playing. It's strange, the cpu meter will be at 10-15 percent usage, then ramp up wildly and I get clicks and audio drop out issues. Also when I audition loops the hard drive overload icon almost always lights up, even when there aren’t any tracks playing! Many times the HD overdrive lights icon lights up simultaneously as the cpu meter goes off the chart. I realize that ram is an issue, but it seems odd. I have the buffer set way high so thats not the issue either. I was just on my friends old p4 tower with 512 ram and Live 6 runs WAY better. Any tips?
Mind you when the tracks are just playing and I'm not auditioning another track the cpu will usually maintain around 10-20 with occasional ramping up of spu usage. So its not like i have dual core turned off.
BTW this im using Live 6. No other apps or pluggins either!
Again I know ram is essential but it just seems strange, I thought I could get by for at least a little while till I can afford more ram.

What soundcard are you using?

I am not saying that RAM is the culprit, but i had massive dropouts a couple years ago when i bought my 12" G4 1.5ghz Powerbook.
It had 512MB ram as well.

I only had issues with sets that contained several (5 or more) long samples (3 minutes or longer in length)

It drove me nuts, absolutely nuts.
The drop outs went away once i moved to 1.5GB RAM.
My current 2ghz MBP has 2GB Ram, and i've never had a drop out on it.

slipmip wrote:I have a stock blackbook, with just 512 ram, but im getting audio drop
outs with just 3 or 4 loops playing. It's strange, the cpu meter will be at 10-15 percent usage, then ramp up wildly and I get clicks and audio drop out issues.

Your MacBook needs more memory to run Live properly.

Simply add a 1 GB module for a total RAM size of 1,25 GB which is really OK for Live. And don't let you irritate by the legend that the MacBook is noticable faster when you insert two identical modules.

i took the guy aboves advice and shelled out for 2GB memory, overkill i know but now, no problems at all. i didnt even realise you can upgrade the memory, its easy to do as well!!!

if your in the uk, go to crucial memory, they are the best guys to get it from

How are your clips set up? High Quality? Have you tried different warp modes e.g. not complex? Does it make a difference? Hows your audio output set up? What sample rate's it running at?

~Pev

I also noticed a pretty major difference after upgrading to 2GB. One possible explanation is that OS X grabs memory like crazy -- after a few hours running my macbook usually uses between 1 and 2GB (you can check this in activity monitor, under /Applications/Utilities). If you have only 512MB actually memory, most of this is actually in swap space at any given time (especially because 64MB goes to the video card no matter what), and sudden swap accesses cause problems with realtime performance (because disk access is orders of magnitude slower than memory access). Ironically, most memory is used (according to various things I've read online) by OS X aggressively caching stuff on disk.

There are some things you can do, like not use any dashboard widgets, and make sure nothing else is running when you are using live, that might help in the meantime until you can get more memory.