Ableton Forum

hell all.
im having some problems.

my get up.

1.5 ghz protools
12 inch powerbook
768 ram
digi002
LIVE 5.2.2

generally running about 3 tracks, with a 4th as an aux sending stuff to the drummer

dropouts are happening more and more frequently, with the ORANGE D
what i suspect that could be wrong

1) not enough ram
2) digi 002 just aint right for a live application
3) need a firewire drive to spin faster

the set is generally only about 35 minutes in length, but happens more and more often..

can anyone recommend a soundcard for me that would be prime for live applications.

i need to fix this asap./////// thanks in advance.

The "D" is for "Disk Overload"

Could be caused by a number of things. Possibly a Fragmented hard drive.

Check your warp settings on your clips, if anything is set to "complex" try changing it to a more specific setting like texture/tones/beats.

My machine flips out occasionally when a file stat is set to "complex" hits silenc or a quite part. This just happened with about 8 clips on a G5 with 5 GB of RAM and all the audio on a second drive!!

Might want to check your drive with this utility: http://people.freenet.de/amichalak/page1/page1.html

And follow his instructions. But take it all with a grain of salt. Anytime you enter the optimize/reformat zone, it could mean losing authorizations. But if you system is flipping out on 4 tracks, what good is it?

Hope that helps.

Update:
I just optimized my drive using Techtool Pro, and the system is now fine where it had dropouts before.

It appears to have been a file/disk fragmentation issue.

Might fix your problem as well..

touched1 wrote:Update:
I just optimized my drive using Techtool Pro, and the system is now fine where it had dropouts before.

It appears to have been a file/disk fragmentation issue.

Might fix your problem as well..

Touched1, thats about the craziest stsyem I've heard of Live running on - certainly biggest RAM - fascinating to hear that it seemed to be "unquestionably" disk-related.

Never used Techtool, can you please give us a quick idea of how it differs from Disk Warrior (which has saved my ass a few times!)

cheers
pb

As it turns out, the optimization fixed the dropouts, but the "disk overload" light is still coming on. This is a curious one, I can only get it to happen when I select a cymbal loop, not very long, a few bars, crank up the warp bpm to make it really slow, then turn up the grain size to the max, then rapidly adujust the transpose knob. It will overload the disk everytime I do this.

Yeah, it's a pretty screaming system, and it should not failing like this when I ask it to do this. Processor is at only 40%. Buffer size makes no difference. The drive it is reading from is a secondary 250 GB volume for audio only. It has about 24 GB available, and as I said, has just been defragged.

Here is Apple's article on defragging: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Disk Warrior is a great produuct, and will rebuild the directory, but does notdefrafment a drive. The consensus seems to be that, unless you are working with large audio or video files, and your drive has less than 15% free space, defragging is probably not an issue. I am working with large audio files and my drive was below 10% free space.

I have to give the disclaimer that I've been repairing Macs for years, and have always believed that backing up, reformatting, and copying back was the best way to defrag. In this case, I am backed up with retrospect, but did not feel like testing it, and wanted to see how Techtool handled optimizing a drive.

It took over 35 HOURS TO OPTIMIZE A 250GB DRIVE with 232 GB of data on it, and Techtool crashed twice, which is a terribly risky thing. I may have lost some files, but the data is backed up.

If I could do it over, I would have just cloned to another volume, reformatted, then cloned back.