I have slow disk (WD Purple 3TB) and sometimes have dropouts when many tracks are frozen. I don't want them to be flattened because sometimes I need to tweak plugins and refreeze again. How to force Live to put frozen tracks to RAM by default?

P.S. I have 64gb RAM

 

when I had a slower machine I'd duplicate the tracks and flatten a copy

 

Maybe set up a ram disk, you have plenty ram. The whole project will the be in ram.

 

What is it?

 

A virtual disk in ram, to run your project from. Just google it and there are free ones and maybe also cracked pro ones. I have only 8gb ram and ssd's so not possible or needed for me.
The folder of the projects you are working on is copied to the ram disk (by you) and then you load from there, making loading and streaming audio extremely fast, way beyond ssd.
This can also be automated and of course the ram disk must be copied back to your HD before shutting down, but this can also be automatic if you have the right software, but sorry I have no recent experience with it so no idea what software is best.

 

Its a great question, I hope you get an answer...

The obvious solution is to get an SSD and point your files there. You could get a small drive and use that as an active project drive, then carry across to storage when you aren't working on tracks, 'Collect All And Save' to the Purple.

 

I second both solutions :
-RAM disk with only frozen tracks on it : instant loading
-A cheap (second hand ?) SSD or NVME and track freeze to it

Even brand new, 120GB is 20 bucks. And will save you headaches

 

Thank you for your tips, guys. I have SSD of course and I can move there project and use it there. But it's not convenient for me. Also I don't want collect and save - I have many projects and it will be many samples copies in each project (my projects with all samples always more than 1.5-2gb therefore I don't 'collect and save'). Sad that Live has no global RAM button for all audio

 

That was my thinking, that you use the SSD as a temporary working project, then Collect everything back to the Purple for storage and delete the working tracks when you move on...

Its a bit arse over elbow, but a fast way might be to drag the whole Project to the SSD and boot it from there. I think that would reference the files on SSD... Until the track is finished, or keep freeing up space like this. A couple of gigs shouldn't take long to copy to and from a slow Spinning Drive.

Its not the perfect fix, but it gives you a fast hack without buying an extra SSD.

But on the RAM part its a shame they haven't got this working so that the whole project is just RAM. Referencing different formats has to have at least a small impact on real time processing you'd think, and potential for crashes etc while one thing catches up with another.

 

Thank you for in-depth answer.
Let me show you my steps. Not long ago I found that I have many audio dropouts. I didn't even know why till I noticed that Ableton used my virtual memory on SDD. Then I found that 20% of my SSD health was lost because of it. Then I read about SSD (btw with only Windows on it on my PC) has limited amount of data recording. After that I bought 64 gb RAM and was 'overjoyed' because I thought 'AND NOW MY ABLETON WILL BE OK'. And today I finally realized that I messed up :D. Live love my HDDs and it doesn't care how much RAM I have.
That's why I don't want to use SSD as a temp folder for my projects. Because I write many songs.

 

Absolutely. You do not want to be constantly writing/changing the content of your internal SSD. And when it comes to External SSD, the increased speed is great; but it can also be a waste of money. If you are a heavy Kontakt user; they can make sense. But the current external HDDs available are much faster now than someone might expect, and so much less expensive per TB. If you connect via USB-C and a decent cable, the throughput won't be annoying either for normal production stuff. Way cheaper.

 

Another option is Primo Cache : it will use your SSD as cache for your HDD.
And use RAM cache AT THE SAME TIME for the last used files.

It is fully configurable (prefer older files vs new files ...)

30 days free trial
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/download.html

 

In the past I used Ramdisk for Page File and Project files, alongside SSD. Some great advantages if one has enough ram available; it was extremely useful back on 32bit OS where memory beyond the utilisation limit of windows could be used. I'd say with some setups likely still useful, although i'd be more selective of which project files were being cached to ramdisk in future. TIP - create simple empty/small default ramdisk image rather than saving project to ramdisk image; ie Save to SSD when you close Ramdisk.. a large default ramdisk creates some load time overhead which was slightly annoying even with ssd, not tried with NVME. Also I only ever had one or the other at any given time due to the amount of memory that i had... performance gains with page file on ramdisk were amazing and with projects useful as long as they're not tooooo large.

Several other options available:
https://www.geckoandfly.com/21507/ramdisk-virtual-disk-memory/ =)

 

Last edited: Nov 4, 2022

Thank you for recommendations!

It's interesting for me to use RAM disk. Cause I have 64gb RAM I read that after PC reboot all files from RAM disk will be deleted. Can this software sync files from RAM disk to any physical disk (for example every 2-5 minutes)? May be someoune knows anything similar?

 

Last edited: Nov 4, 2022

You could use something like Macrium Reflect or similar to create incremental backup of the ramdisk, essentially the Ramdisk will show like any other dir/disk, only it's virtual, kind of like when one mounts a disk with alcohol120 (sort of, only writable)> I used to copy my ramdisk files manually due to potential for overhead when incremental backups were being created. CPU and RAM is way faster now than when i was using Ramdisk (circa 2012-2015), so likely less of an issue these days and if you were backing ramdisk up to current day SSD/NVME (with around 7-8000mbps read/write) it would back up in a flash. Since i was carrying out this proceedure manually i think this is why i found using it for pagefile more practacle. If you are using Studio One you could set your auto save to the ramdisk and have autosaves go to a physical disk.