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Ableton Live hard disk overload?

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  • 26-11-2011 6:23pm
    #1
    rcaz
    Registered Users Posts: 4,034 ✭✭✭


    I've been working on a new song with my band, where I use Live to play back guitar samples. I have six clips, each only a few seconds long, of me playing individual chords on guitar, all constantly playing and I fade them in and out on the mixer. Every clip is in RAM mode, and I'm still getting a flashing hard disk overload indicator.

    I'm using a MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM which I figured would be plenty able for this kind of thing. Tomorrow I'll try converting the samples to mono and try out a lower bitrate, which I only thought of now, anything else anyone would suggest?

    Thanks!


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    #2
    electrogrimey
    Registered Users Posts: 3,791 ✭✭✭electrogrimey


    How many VSTs are running on each channel? That's the main thing that kills Ableton. If each one has EQ, reverb, compressor + effects, they're gonna eat up loads of CPU.

    If you do have lots, try freezing and flattening them and that should help a lot.

    Is there anything running in the background? iTunes running always makes Ableton act up for me.

    4GB should be loads alright...Is your harddrive nearly full by any chance? If there's under 10GB (I think) free space it starts using you RAM as storage which fucks everything up.

    Even though you don't need to, assuming your Mac allows it, you could upgrade to 2 x 4GBs of ram anyway, because it's cheap as chips. I upgraded from 2 x 1 GBs to 2 x 2GBs for about €50.


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    #3
    Quiggers
    Closed Accounts Posts: 282 ✭✭Quiggers


    are you using the internal drive, these run at 54000rpm, which is a tad slow,
    an external drive with a power supply will run at 72000rpm,

    file fragmentation might also be an issue, use the collect all and save
    feature to bring all the project files and samples into one neat little folder.


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    #4
    rcaz
    Registered Users Posts: 4,034 ✭✭✭rcaz


    Oh, I actually figured this one out and forgot to post. It was all me being silly - instead of having a separate clip for a Cmaj7 and an Fmaj7, I was using the clip for Cmaj7 twice, once at pitch and once shifted down a perfect fourth. So the HDD overload was 'cause I was trying to call the same clip twice at the exact same time. Just recorded a new F, sorted :o


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