Just Some Problems I Noticed About Live
Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 8:06 am
Yeah, I'm sure that i should be posting this in a Bugs Post or something, but figured I'd post here as well, just in case I'm missing something basic in my operation of Live. Just wanted to be sure to give everyone a shot at calling me a moron...
I use Live 7.09 by the way, with a M-Audio Firewire 1410... MacBook Pro 2.4 15inch 4 GB Ram...External harddrive at 7200 RPM...more than 20 percent free space on OS and external drive...
First problem: I have never, ever been able to create a Live Pack (from my existing show Project) that I was able to open. I get an error message that tells me the file is corrupt. - No biggie, I used to (read on) Save As to another hard drive, then Collect All and Save to archive the project that I have built my life around (literally....it feeds, clothes, and shelters me)
Second Problem: The "Crop Sample" function crops, but moves the warp markers, basically making the new samples suck ass. - This doesn't matter anymore, because I've decided to always have the whole sample on hand, just in case I want to use other parts.
Third Problem: From what I can tell, when Live first opens, it loads ALL of a Projects compressed samples (mp3s in my case) into RAM, and THEN decodes and uncompresses them into the Hard Drive (decoding cache), from where it will stream upon launch. This can be seen when a Sample is selected in Session View, and the wave form is visible, but grayed out. Upon selection however, Ableton points all its resources to decoding that Sample first. - This used to NOT be a problem for me. However, the other night, right before I went on, I loaded some new samples in my Live live Project, and unknowingly had my Live Set hit the magic 4 GB mark (the same amount of Ram on my MacBook). I started to play, and kept on getting a "There is not enough memory available. Please save your live set now and quit." If I hit the "Ok" button enough time, it would resume decoding.
I had to restart the session, during my show, and cover my tracks with iTunes.
It was a "I really miss records" moment.
Basically, after taking a look at my set and the decoding cache, I noticed that as the decoding cache fills, the error message becomes less and less frequent, until the whole set is loaded, and nothing is played out of RAM at that point...
This never happened on my PowerBook G4 12inch with 2 GB of RAM running Live 5...the samples were never pre-decoded in RAM before decoding in the Hard Drive decoding cache.... If the samples weren't decoded yet, you just wouldn't see the waveform. Which was fine by me...I'd simply spend an hour loading up my live set...at least I knew that it wouldn't crash while I played.
Looks like I'll have to reevaluate my strategy for quick access to samples and a quick cue list that one can jump to points within a give sample - as it seems my set has grown to big for my RAM...
And forget about Save As and Collect All and Save as a back up strategy....Live seems to want to Collect all the samples to a new folder, and load them up into RAM, and decode all at the same time...making the "not enough memory" error appear for what appears to be forever...
I've already figured work arounds for it all...except backing up reliably. It just sucks that I ran into this - when I was finally getting back to using Live the way I saw most fit (which is really, to me, the beauty of this divine piece of programming), I realize that I have to conform my ideas to the limitation imposed.
Oh well.
Happy music making,
DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com
I use Live 7.09 by the way, with a M-Audio Firewire 1410... MacBook Pro 2.4 15inch 4 GB Ram...External harddrive at 7200 RPM...more than 20 percent free space on OS and external drive...
First problem: I have never, ever been able to create a Live Pack (from my existing show Project) that I was able to open. I get an error message that tells me the file is corrupt. - No biggie, I used to (read on) Save As to another hard drive, then Collect All and Save to archive the project that I have built my life around (literally....it feeds, clothes, and shelters me)
Second Problem: The "Crop Sample" function crops, but moves the warp markers, basically making the new samples suck ass. - This doesn't matter anymore, because I've decided to always have the whole sample on hand, just in case I want to use other parts.
Third Problem: From what I can tell, when Live first opens, it loads ALL of a Projects compressed samples (mp3s in my case) into RAM, and THEN decodes and uncompresses them into the Hard Drive (decoding cache), from where it will stream upon launch. This can be seen when a Sample is selected in Session View, and the wave form is visible, but grayed out. Upon selection however, Ableton points all its resources to decoding that Sample first. - This used to NOT be a problem for me. However, the other night, right before I went on, I loaded some new samples in my Live live Project, and unknowingly had my Live Set hit the magic 4 GB mark (the same amount of Ram on my MacBook). I started to play, and kept on getting a "There is not enough memory available. Please save your live set now and quit." If I hit the "Ok" button enough time, it would resume decoding.
I had to restart the session, during my show, and cover my tracks with iTunes.
It was a "I really miss records" moment.
Basically, after taking a look at my set and the decoding cache, I noticed that as the decoding cache fills, the error message becomes less and less frequent, until the whole set is loaded, and nothing is played out of RAM at that point...
This never happened on my PowerBook G4 12inch with 2 GB of RAM running Live 5...the samples were never pre-decoded in RAM before decoding in the Hard Drive decoding cache.... If the samples weren't decoded yet, you just wouldn't see the waveform. Which was fine by me...I'd simply spend an hour loading up my live set...at least I knew that it wouldn't crash while I played.
Looks like I'll have to reevaluate my strategy for quick access to samples and a quick cue list that one can jump to points within a give sample - as it seems my set has grown to big for my RAM...
And forget about Save As and Collect All and Save as a back up strategy....Live seems to want to Collect all the samples to a new folder, and load them up into RAM, and decode all at the same time...making the "not enough memory" error appear for what appears to be forever...
I've already figured work arounds for it all...except backing up reliably. It just sucks that I ran into this - when I was finally getting back to using Live the way I saw most fit (which is really, to me, the beauty of this divine piece of programming), I realize that I have to conform my ideas to the limitation imposed.
Oh well.
Happy music making,
DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com
