Ableton Forum

I bought Live quite recently so here's my question.
I use Live for DJing, I have 50 plus tracks in high quality mp3 format.
I analised and warped each of them tweaking any issues manually.
BUT, everytime I play my set, Live duplicates each track inside the Decoding Cache folder as BIG WAV files taking a lot of space in my HD, why's this?
ALSO, everytime it takes a while for each track to load in the session view, they load in a gray colour and only start displaying when clicked once. Why's that? shouldn't they supposed to load fast since they have been already analised?

Thanks for any commnet regarding this matter.

p.s. I've already looked in the manual but did not find any satisfactory answers.

Just a guess:

Live has to play back a lot of data on demand.

MP3s take a lot of CPU horsepower to render.

WAV files (or AIF) take very little.

QED.

Same way browsers cache data locally, OS's cache directories,
you have short term memory, etc. etc.

Thank you for the post. I had no idea MP3 used all that CPU, that's a new one.
Agree with all the rest.

It wasn't all that long ago that computers could not
even play MP3's in real time. I think you needed at least
a Pentium 3 at 200 MHz to do it.

It's funny, I'm using an iBook G3 800 and clearly remember not long ago not having issues of this kind. I guess it's time to upgrade to a better, faster machine.

But the main point is: Live always decodes the mp3 to a cache, and you cannot change that.

You can control the size of the cache, but that's it.

waveman wrote:It's funny, I'm using an iBook G3 800 and clearly remember not long ago not having issues of this kind. I guess it's time to upgrade to a better, faster machine.

This issue alone is not a reason to upgrade.

The decoding cache can be placed on any partition, and
it need not be exceptionally fast.

move the decoded wave files to a separate folder and use these instead of the MP3's. as said earlier Live will always decode the MP3 , so you might as well save it, and you, the bother

Great idea. Thanks.