IDK, may be that it works but with that big orchestral project a single PC is most likely not able to play it without freezing. But anyway more RAM is always good.

 

Last edited: Aug 28, 2023

By the way, we are talking about large orchestral arrangements in Ableton Live???

 

Yes. IDK if that can even work or how to do it in Ableton.
But @Nick Bellagio has done it, somehow.

 

Last edited: Aug 28, 2023

yes

 

Ok but i just switched them to USB 4.0 directly into my comp earlier and it didnt change anything and its not the first time ive tested that

 

OK, I never tried to work on something as large as this on Ableton, so I assume I'm not much of a help here. I just used Ableton Live for very simple projects so far. Logic is my main composing, arranging and production DAW for over 20 years now, and Reaper for mixing and mastering tasks...

I don't know your musical and technical background, but telling us you can't do any proper work with todays average 32 GB 8 core CPU machine is just ridiculous.

 

well.. i can, if i want to bounce every other track to audio. which is ridiculous

 

Just to add on to some of the other advice given so far:

I use Ableton/Kontakt to score film/tv for work and I'll tell you the biggest difference (aside from fast ram) is getting an M.2 NVME drive for everything, your OS, your kontakt libraries. EVERYTHING. It runs on the PCI Express buss instead of SATA so it's ALOT faster. Libraries load almost instantly for me and I never get as much as a hiccup without freezing. I only use SATA SSDs for my backups. If your Motherboard is older and doesn't have m.2 slots, I would suggest upgrading your motherboard to one that has at least 2/3.

BUT

As for RAM, if you want to get 128gb (or anything 64gb or above) then stick with a DDR4 motherboard for now, DDR5 ram cannot run at advertised speeds (above 4800) in 4 DIMM configurations. Only 2 DIMM configurations work at speeds above 4800.

Your CPU seems to be ok, so depending on how much cash you have, go for NVME drives instead of SATA SSDs

 

Can you hear it... the echo, echo... JK! Yep you need M.2 drives man! Sucks to change over but worth it. 64 G RAM will help as well but 128 is overkill and money is better spent on the drives. Also, don't cheap out on your power supply that's a mistake, alot for 150w overhead so 750 min.

 

the problem is that Developers are using .png today .. like SD3... takes more time to load SD2 was more efficient --
arturia too.. latest .. i don't think is a good idea to use .png and animate the .png .. so much.. at all.. i prefer faster VST or AU
than feeling that i am inside a XBOX game.

 

I have an m.2 drive but its only 1TB and its internal all my libraries are on external SSDs - so you're saying that my 32G ram may not be overloaded but too slow and thats whats causing my pc to say that the memory is being overloaded - im confused aobut the motherboard bit and the RAM why cant I get internal m.2 drives and 128G of RAM

 

Nick, as I said, I don't think you'll be happy with a single PC if you want to play such large orchestral projects. The work becomes a torture.

That's why I recommend you again to get involved with VEP (Vienna Ensemble Pro 7). I have just started a project of mine.
It runs on my PC(1), 18 Core I9 64GB Ram + a second older PC(2) with 8 cores and 96 GB RAM. To start the project on my PC(1) takes about one minute, on the PC(2) three minutes. When I play the project with 32 TRacks the CPU load on PC(1) is 3% and the RAM is 700 MB for Cubase, on PC(2) CPU is 5%, RAM usage is 11 GB. Thats nothing.

This makes orchestra projects fun again!​

Also your PC is responsive again. No need for upgrades.

VEP works as a VST2/VST3 plugin, so also for Ableton. I was looking for a video that explains step by step how to build a project with Cubase and VEP. (There will be something like that for Ableton too):

If you build an older PC as a VEP server, the costs are estimated as follows: PC $300, RAM Upgrade to 64 GB $200, 4Port 1Gbit Router $50, 2 Networkadaptors 1GBit (for your PC and the second machine) $50. Together ~ $600. Plus VEP 1 license+Ilok Stick $165 ($125 VEP atm, $40 iLok) But most people like us have older PCs and parts in the basement , so you may only need the VEP license and the iLok stick.
You wont need a Monitor for the second PC. After installing the PC you manage everything with Windows 10 Pros own Remote Desktop. So the second PC can even exist in another room so you won't even hear its noise.

AFAIK there is a test license for VEP so if you have an older PC around, you can test it without costs. p.s.: yes there is a 30 days trial.
Think about it.

That's my last post on it. I already sound like a VEP salesman

 

Last edited: Aug 29, 2023

100%

 

haha ok, Im going to look into this. I was kind of deterred because It sounds like a pain in the ass but If i get all these upgrades and it doesnt make any difference Im going to be really pissed. Id really just like everything in one box open up ableton and just do what i want. I feel like if i my pc performed just a little bit better i wouldnt have any issues but who knows. again thanks for all your input on all of this and trying to help out

 

If you are doing huge 50 instances then yeah you're probably better off with @twoheart recommendations. 2TB M.2's are cheap and I'm going to say your board would probably accept 2-3 internally. In the near future 4TB drives should come down but we'll see.

 

Last edited: Aug 29, 2023

yeah i might try the drives and an extra 32 of ram to see if it works better first cuz it definitely seems like a pain in the ass but a solution if it doesnt work

 

It is. Most of the work is done by your SSD and CPU, with RAM acting only as a tiny buffer to make sound before the files can be loaded off the SSD. That's how a Kontakt library that takes up 120 GB on your disk does not have to use 120 GB of RAM, but might use 200 or 400 MB. These couple hundred MB are just the beginnings of the samples, and as soon as you hit a note the beginning plays from RAM, and your PC rushes to load the file off your SSD. Hence, a fast SSD is very much key for these days sample libraries.

Direct From Disk. This is the technology explained above, compared to regular loading of the sample files into RAM in their entirety.

It is "good" if you have no audio interface and don't want to wait 2 seconds between pressing a key and hearing a sound. Straight from the website:

WDM is what chrome, minecraft and spotify use to play sound (indirectly, through asking Windows to play sound). It is what provides you with per-app volume slider, switching speakers/headphone, converting sample rates between 44.1k and 48k, all that stuff. It takes processing power. Most of it was never designed to require being fast, though improvements have been made. You can look it up here.

Long story short, ASIO4All is what you use if you don't have an audio interface and are too broke/stubborn to get one. Then it's kinda sorta usable, except you can't play anything else while your DAW is open, and the performance is still way worse than using an audio interface and ASIO drivers. It is sometimes used as a fix when your audio interface is some built in option in a keyboard, or like a USB-connected microphone, but that's just because the drivers are a huge pile of turd and ASIO4All is actually better in that case. In most, it is not. You're throwing out ASIO drivers made by Universal Audio and using a hacky workaround that tries to simulate ASIO out of regular Windows audio drivers instead

Most likely a cable needs to be replaced. Failing that, possibly any hub you've been using. Since you mentioned downgrading to 3.0, I presume you had something else like a Thunderbolt or something, the quality of these vary wildly and you can get anything from Thunderbolt 4 at 40Gb/s (=5GB/s) to USB 3.0 (5Gb/s = 600 MB/s) or even USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s = 60MB/s). USB-C is pretty and all, but it can be USB 2.0 or just a charging port if the associated electronics are missing. Just like you can't connect a 4K monitor or external GPU over USB-C to a Samsung phone - there was no need for adding costly chips to support that. Computer hardware manufacturers know most people are cheapskates and thus deliver products that the public voted for with their wallet.

Careful there, if you get a discrete GPU, it might easily draw 100-150W doing nothing but displaying facebook. As soon as you use a >60Hz monitor, or two monitors, it'll jump the memory clock to the maximum and your PC goes from ~80W to 200W and beyond. This is not only a matter of power bill and heat in your studio - heat also needs to be exchanged to keep your PC cool, and that's done by fans, aka noise.

Beware most external SSDs are kinda eh for the reasons given above. They might very well be 2.5" HDDs in rubber enclosures, or flash drive grade SSDs with no DRAM cache or proper controller, and garbage heat dissipation. Your average SATA SSD should do 500MB/s or so, a NVMe 2500-3000 MB/s at the very least. This does not exactly matter in your scenario, since that'd apply to moving say, a 100 GB video file around, but it goes in pair with how fast tons of small files can be loaded - which is exactly what Kontakt does.

That said, the screenshot does clearly show your problem is indeed RAM usage, and it's absolutely ridiculous. You want to do this in settings:

Note the checkbox to the right, not just the slider. This tells Kontakt to only load the first 6kB of each sample, and the rest will be grabbed off the SSD as soon as possible when you play a note. Should decrease your RAM usage by a lot. Be aware this is a tradeoff, you use less RAM in exchange for stressing your disks and CPU harder, you're likely going to need to find the sweet spot there. If your external SSDs are indeed fast and you don't run out of CPU power, feel free to tweak to the left.

You also want to purge samples:

It's absolutely essential for working in Kontakt and makes sure you only have the notes you play loaded, instead of having everything in RAM just in case. Beware this will mean you won't hear your note or you'll get a glitch if your hardware is not fast enough to grab the sample in time. This might show up on exported files, so careful there. As soon as you play a few notes, they'll be loaded, but just for the notes you played.

 

Also, since you mentioned Ableton and orchestral work - Daniel James has been working with Ableton as a successful trailer composer for years, though he did switch to Cubase like 7 years ago. Ableton is a bit unwieldy for the task, you have no concept of tracks other than stereo (no mono tracks, but also no 5.1, 7.1, Atmos - they all require faffing about with send tracks, external outputs, and so on), there's no search option for tracks (which, trust me, is important once you go beyond 100 or so tracks).

See these:

and note the RAM usage of each instrument:

Since that video is 7 years old, you can be sure your CPU did not exist yet, so there's a very good chance this is running on a significantly less capable computer than yours.

Note this stack (and not all instruments are visible, see the scrollbar) uses 3.41 GB of RAM:


Mind you, he also uses a lot of instruments in a single Kontakt plugin, which is the way to go if you want a lot of instruments at once. Make sure you disable Database in Kontakt options, as that's loaded per Kontakt plugin and adds up. This is also the reason why you want 16 instruments in Kontakt and MIDI tracks hooked up to it, instead of 16 tracks with Kontakt, or God forbid, 16 instances of Kontakt on a single track in an Instrument Rack.

You do not want to do your layered sounds by setting volumes of multiple Kontakts in an Instrument Rack on a single track in Ableton.

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2023

Problems can come from all directions but a good start is to try LatencyMon 7.31 (Home Edition) from here.
https://resplendence.com/downloads (scroll to near bottom) and see if anything is triggered as being problematic.
Sometimes Disabling Turbo/Smart Step for the CPU helps too or any other things that make it operate higher than its normal speed meaning don't overclock.
A lot of time issues can be from LAN/Network/WAN (Wi-Fri) so best to disconnect from Wi-Fi/Ethernet when working on audio.
I just had very slow reactions to right click on my mouse, transferring files and doing other tasks etc. recently which was very strange and discovered it was ZoneAlarm Free Firewall that I'd been using for many many years by looking in Event Viewer in windows.
Always use the ASIO Drivers you got with your Audio Interface. Good Luck!

 

No question, but the direction of the comment was intended to the OP who's question is will adding a new more powerful (read: expensive) GPU do anything to increase the unexpectedly poor performance of his build. Should he spend the extra money? He does not mention doing anything in Linux with CUDA (although he could). My answer is to not buy the bare minimum but not spend any extra money. Unless the Liquid Cooled system he has built with a water pump, radiator, larger psu, and other components mentioned in his first post is not done correctly; none of your "concerns" are unaddressed already. What additional heat should be exchanged? He could probably stick multiple Nvidias in it and still not have heat be a factor for a lot of concern.

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2023