After 2 years of Ableton Live Suite 8 working perfectly… all of a sudden, I’m getting slight cpu spikes while producing, but most importantly the ‘D’ for Hard Drive Overload come on at random times after DJing for 1hr +.
I thought the issue was my shitty macbook pro hard drive @5400rpm, so I just upgraded to a 256GB solid state drive which has SERIOUSLY boosted the performance of Live and my entire computer. However, the issue with the ‘D’ coming on and stopping my tracks mid-set, still happens.
I have the latest version right now 8.2.8, and I’m not sure what the problem is. My tracks are all in the same folder, I have RAM on, my samples is set to 512 samples. Everything else is pretty much stock, and while DJing I’ll only have 2 tracks going at once.
Really don’t know what to do…
SPECS:
MacBook Pro late 2011
4GB RAM
256GB SSD drive
2.4GHz quad core intel i5
I’m thinking it’s not a hardware issue anymore. It worked great for over a year without any audio dropouts/hard disk overloads. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? When DJs play live sets in Ableton, do they freeze their tracks if they’re not using VSTs or plug ins?
I was having the same issues till I cleared out my cache folder before playing, and moved my sample/gig folder to a different drive than the cache folder (I got an Optibay Clone), so far so good and I haven’t seen the dreaded overload come on yet.
I’m using 8 tracks total with FX on all channels and preloading around 60 full length tunes and 100ish loops. CPU peaks around 40%
Yes, but if you take it to 8gb you have 4gb dedicated to Ableton and the rest for the OS (hugely recommended with Lion). Only spec my lappy is superior is in RAM and even with a much slower drive and processor i rarely get spikes or drops.
You can also take advantage of that extra RAM and preload some samples into it (there is a RAM button when you double click a clip near the tempo box).
Clean the Ableton cache in the prefs window like you have been already told and give Onyx a run to do some maintenance on your system.
If you are in fact playing live most of the people do bounce everything down to WAVs unless you are planning on seriously tweaking it but if that is the case you should still be economical with plugins.
He’s running a 256 SSD though (which I missed), so really should not be getting disk read errors & ram will not help with them - certainly doesn’t sound like he’s lacking in juice (no harm checking the ram usage in activity monitor though).
Even running out of the ram the SSD should have enough “oomph” to allot virtual memory almost as fast.
My bad to resurrect a dead thread, but I found the solution if anyone has a similar problem:
I turned RAM mode off for everything/cleared my cache
Had to turn my buffer size really high (1500 right now) which means LOTs of latency, but it’s hardly noticeable since I launch my clips quantized a bar earlier.
No, but at the same time I started having hard drive problems in general where many programs were slow to boot and the whole OS would sometimes fail to boot. Hard Drive ‘First Aid’, as it’s called, helped but it forced me to upgrade to the SSD.