Ableton Forum

i've got an arrangement with about 40 audio tracks, and the max amount of tracks playing at the same time is about 25.
i experience audio dropouts with a flashing D.
so i decided to put all th clips in RAM, as i have 2GB (the project takes about 1GB). and IT'S EVEN WORSE!!!!!
i can now just hear a few elements at the same time, and i still got the flashing D. how can this happen if all clips are in RAM?

I thought the flashing D was a visual effect.

It flashes to the rhythm of the beat on my system
However, this is in small sets. So I haven't experienced the dropouts that should come with it.

I am a bit suspicious of the RAM button also. I was trying to test out the limits of my 2G for the person who was complaining about hitting a wall at 1.7G ---

I swear the size of the patches I was loading into RAM did not match up with the amount of RAM which was showing as used in the task manager.

peeddrroo wrote:i've got an arrangement with about 40 audio tracks, and the max amount of tracks playing at the same time is about 25.
i experience audio dropouts with a flashing D.
so i decided to put all th clips in RAM, as i have 2GB (the project takes about 1GB). and IT'S EVEN WORSE!!!!!
i can now just hear a few elements at the same time, and i still got the flashing D. how can this happen if all clips are in RAM?

.. a little secret:

the RAM button is a placebo

peeddrroo wrote:i've got an arrangement with about 40 audio tracks, and the max amount of tracks playing at the same time is about 25.
i experience audio dropouts with a flashing D.
so i decided to put all th clips in RAM, as i have 2GB (the project takes about 1GB). and IT'S EVEN WORSE!!!!!
i can now just hear a few elements at the same time, and i still got the flashing D. how can this happen if all clips are in RAM?

Hi,

What happens if you quit Live and reopn it, with clips already set to 'RAM'? What happens in the task manager?

Regards,
Amaury

I have experienced the same problem.

Been trying to rebuild my live setup. It used to run two Live Sets on two G4 Powerbook 500MHz's. One had 700 Mb of clips, the other 1.4 Gb of clips. Both of these sets run fine on a Powerbook with 1Gb of RAM. Most clips are playing off disk, with a few in RAM.

So I tried to combine both sets into one on my new Macbook Pro C2D 2.33 Ghz , and the results were AWFUL! Stutters, long drop-outs, slowdowns and speedups...

As above, putting all clips into RAM made things even worse.

so i tried with a set with 19 audio tracks. no effects, no midi, nothing, just 19 audio tracks playing.
with the clips not in RAM, i can play the set up to a certain time when the D starts blinking and the dropouts start.
memory in task manager is 154MB
if i then load all the clips into RAM, it goes to 1026MB when idle, and i almost can't hear the set (it's like i have a maximum of 3 tracks playing at the same time, sometimes just silence).
if i close and reopen Live and load the set with clips already in RAM mode, the memory in task manager goes up to 993MB, and it still plays almost nothing out of the 19 tracks.
each audio file is 81MB, 44.1/24 aiff
come on, 19 audio tracks. that's not a lot.

that's REALLY annoying.
how come am i not able to play 19 audio tracks at the same time?
even 15 won't do.

amo, don't ditch this one, i'm watching you

Hi,

Ha! I expected I could avoid it!

Seriously, I forwarded the thread to the people who are able to know what is going on. I'm not. I'll let you know as soon as I get an answer.

best,
Amaury

i had the same problem with 17 trax.

i made a live set, 17 tracks playing the clips in the session mode. all clips in the scenes, about 100 scenes in total (10 songs), clips 8-64 bars long.

i have experienced drop outs 5 seconds breaks D flashing etc.

the first thing what i did was move all audio to the external SATA II drive connected through PCIe ESata card.

after that was better but not the best, so what i did next:

1. consolidate all clips (into individual audio files)
2. minimise the number of trax - from 17 - 8 (!!!)
3. all clips are 16 bit aiff
4. more RAM - now i have 2 gb
5. hi-q mode disabled in the clips

now it's ok but it's a BIG compromise!

peeddrroo wrote:that's REALLY annoying.
how come am i not able to play 19 audio tracks at the same time?
even 15 won't do.

That's probably your hard drive being too slow for this, quite simply. The seek time of the hard drive is the limiting factor here, and notebook hard drives are not very good in that respect. (To verify this, try a USB stick if you have one; you will probably be able to stream a lot more samples at a time off the stick than off the hard drive.)

Getting a fast external firewire hard drive can probably help a lot.

As for the RAM button: this is usually not a solution to this problem. It's just too likely that you increase Live's memory consumption so much that you run into swapping problems, which are far worse than occasional drop-outs, as you noticed.

Stefan Haller wrote:The seek time of the hard drive is the limiting factor here, and notebook hard drives are not very good in that respect. (To verify this, try a USB stick if you have one; you will probably be able to stream a lot more samples at a time off the stick than off the hard drive.)

Stefan, Are you saying that playing sets off a USB stick is a strategy to seriously investigate for gigs? Because if it is, I will.

Pitch Black wrote:Stefan, Are you saying that playing sets off a USB stick is a strategy to seriously investigate for gigs? Because if it is, I will.

Probably only if you have drop-out problems when streaming off your hard drive. For this, a USB stick may be better because it has virtually no seek time; for everything else (loading or saving sets, for example), the stick is probably going to be a lot slower.

Stefan Haller wrote:

Pitch Black wrote:Stefan, Are you saying that playing sets off a USB stick is a strategy to seriously investigate for gigs? Because if it is, I will.

Probably only if you have drop-out problems when streaming off your hard drive. For this, a USB stick may be better because it has virtually no seek time; for everything else (loading or saving sets, for example), the stick is probably going to be a lot slower.

even on the new sata drives? i assume it would have something to do with the drive being made differently to the conventional disk / laser mechanism.