Ableton Forum

I don't know about you guys and gals
but i like to have a wide variety of samples in my drum racks
so i can pick and choose as i write my music.
i very rarely start a project and think
" i know exactly the drum sound i need for this"
more often i like to drop large groups of drum sounds from my sample collection onto drum rack and audition them as i write.
I find this much more inspirational especially for techno which is what i write.

Problem was, that lot's of seperate tracks of drum racks bursting with drum sounds was slowing down the computer to the point where crashes and ghost parts and all sorts of wierd things were starting to happen.

and it was seriously p***ing me off!

so , talked to the very helpful ableton guys about this
and we worked this out:

drum rack defaults to use the simpler as the sample editor right?
and the simpler loads all your samples into RAM by default and theres no way to change that.
so , if you have 50 or so drum samples in several different drum racks , ie: 50 kicks in on drum rack . 50 snares in another 50 hi hats etc etc etc ...
Ableton's RAM based functions ( such as copying, deleting, pasting, changing scenes etc ) will slow right down and get glitchy because the ram is full of all these ( largely unused ) samples.

so: the workaround :
create a midi track
drag an empty sampler onto it and set it up the way you like it
( don't turn the RAM button on! )
once it's all ready to go, drag it from the track
into the ableton library in your browser
to the " dropping samples " folder
and drop it in the folder " on drum rack "

next time you pull out a drum rack
it'll use the sampler instead of the simpler as it's editor
the samples will play direct from your hard disk not from RAM and ableton will run at a much better speed because of this.

for me, this setting is CONSIDERABLY faster than before.
so if you are having this particular problem give it a go.

hope this is of some help.

cheers
d

Mac Intel Dual Core 266GHz, 4GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11
Ableton 7.0.10 , Digidesign 002R

Great tip, thanks!

I have gotten much better results using this method as well, too. Never quite understood why until now. Thanks for the explanation!

I have defaults for just about everything including the effects and slicer algorithms.

Make sure you have Sampler set for "Show preset name" if you want to see the sample name in the drum rack. Otherwise you see "Sampler" for everything.

Also you might want to tweak the amplitude envelopes for drums and not use the default settings.

arachnaut wrote:I have defaults for just about everything including the effects and slicer algorithms.

Make sure you have Sampler set for "Show preset name" if you want to see the sample name in the drum rack. Otherwise you see "Sampler" for everything.

Also you might want to tweak the amplitude envelopes for drums and not use the default settings.

nice

arachnaut wrote:defaults for ... slicer algorithms

good tips

What do you mean by this?
(yes, I'm ignorant of this one)

Good tip... i don't have sampler tough.

nice tip!

did Ableton tell you if there is ever a time where it's more CPU efficient to use Simpler? If not, I'll probably just use Sampler all the time

I figure that's why I get an occaisional pop when I'm changing drum rack parameters. I'm guess because Ram usage might be changing too quickly. I'll try the suggestion.

Thanks that's a good one.

Great tip. Now I know why I was running out of memory.

one thing
apart from this obvious advantage, does using Sampler in drum Rack instead of Simpler bring any disadvantages?

Good tip, but with sampler I wont be able to apply different effects to each sound.

i ran into this problem last night after chopping up a reasonably sized sample... it freaking locked up everything! wish i had sampler!

Grappadura wrote:Good tip, but with sampler I wont be able to apply different effects to each sound.

you will. One sampler per sample - at least that's how I understand the idea of the original poster.
Dave?

one sampler per sample same as before
you can still apply effects to individual sounds same as with simpler
just click the little arrow at the top and drag your fx onto the channel you want.

it doesn't seem to have any downsides, using sampler instead of simpler

except you have to buy sampler of course.
i got it because you can load logics factory esx24 patches into it.
another very good use for it
and of course for rex file conversion too

I don't think there is a time where simpler will be much more cpu efficient
so i would just use sampler all the time
unless you just want less knobs to twiddle.

davethedrummer wrote:I don't know about you guys and gals
but i like to have a wide variety of samples in my drum racks
so i can pick and choose as i write my music.
i very rarely start a project and think
" i know exactly the drum sound i need for this"
more often i like to drop large groups of drum sounds from my sample collection onto drum rack and audition them as i write.
I find this much more inspirational especially for techno which is what i write.

Problem was, that lot's of seperate tracks of drum racks bursting with drum sounds was slowing down the computer to the point where crashes and ghost parts and all sorts of wierd things were starting to happen.

and it was seriously p***ing me off!

so , talked to the very helpful ableton guys about this
and we worked this out:

drum rack defaults to use the simpler as the sample editor right?
and the simpler loads all your samples into RAM by default and theres no way to change that.
so , if you have 50 or so drum samples in several different drum racks , ie: 50 kicks in on drum rack . 50 snares in another 50 hi hats etc etc etc ...
Ableton's RAM based functions ( such as copying, deleting, pasting, changing scenes etc ) will slow right down and get glitchy because the ram is full of all these ( largely unused ) samples.

so: the workaround :
create a midi track
drag an empty sampler onto it and set it up the way you like it
( don't turn the RAM button on! )
once it's all ready to go, drag it from the track
into the ableton library in your browser
to the " dropping samples " folder
and drop it in the folder " on drum rack "

next time you pull out a drum rack
it'll use the sampler instead of the simpler as it's editor
the samples will play direct from your hard disk not from RAM and ableton will run at a much better speed because of this.

for me, this setting is CONSIDERABLY faster than before.
so if you are having this particular problem give it a go.

hope this is of some help.

cheers
d

Mac Intel Dual Core 266GHz, 4GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11
Ableton 7.0.10 , Digidesign 002R

sick sick sick

cheers for this, been really bugging me