You’ll see a marked increas in performance especially ehrn doing a large export.

I tried the sending option its works great. Also the freeze > flatten way is also pretty good for reducing cpu overload.

Hi and thx for the tip! It also aplies for Windows 8.1? 🙂

Then you only making music and no computer support! 😀

Live 9 has a preference for its temporary file location as well as its decoding cache location.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/readyboost

This basically gives you the same benefits as Apple’s Fusion drives – recently used data gets copied to the flash drive and your read/write speeds will be way faster.

When I figured this out, I was amazed at how much it sped up my older computer and it’s basically free to try out.

whiteblob

It sounds like you may be a little confused about what MIDI jitter is and why it matters.

‘Swing” or groove, as Linn notes, is not magic – it’s a function of things like how offbeats are delayed from onbeats, dynamics and importantly – the tightness of your hardware or software.

Jitter is a measure of how accurate or inaccurate the timing of events is, and it’s well documented that this varies A TON from device to device and from system to system.

In general, you can rank sequencers from ‘tight’ to ‘sloppy’ like this:

control voltage sequencing is dead nuts on;
good hardware sequencers like MPCs and old non-multitasking computers are very tight;
badly designed hardware sequencers and modern computers/apps tend to have a lot more ‘slop’, especially with MIDI.

There are a lot of sites that talk about this:

Innerclock has tested tons of systems for jitter. Check out their site – it has lots of information on this:

http://www.innerclocksystems.com/new%20ics%20litmus.html

Eigenzone has a lot of good information on MIDI jitter, too:

http://www.eigenzone.org/2012/12/04/midi-jitter

VAC compared modern computers against an old Atari a few years ago, and he found that the Atari still blew away the modern systems:

http://www.velvetacidchrist.com/2010/02/16/midi-woes-computers-suck-with-hardware-a-grim-tale/

In my experience, you get a lot tighter sequencing in a DAW if you convert to audio and sequence audio vs MIDI.

dear chaz

as you don’t beleave me please read the much touted interview with roger linn about the myth of hardware sequencers http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/roger-linn-swing-groove-magic-mpc-timing/

the only point i would disagree with roger is that it can be achieved on windows machine if your running the right hardware and software set up. an i7 processor has more threads than a windows 7 os can throw at it, so as long as you don’t bog it down with other crap it will work perfect.

as for midi, as long as your device has a decent driver written for it by the manufacture it will work as good as a mac. I use a mac at home and I confess they are better than windows machines mainly because of apples diligence when creating a platform, in this respects to music making through its own midi drivers. But at work i am a qualified IT technician although I do work in a mainly AV environment now (for my sins). windows and the hardware isn’t as bad as people make out, most peoples issues with windows can be solved with a bit of knowledge and experience.

These recommendations seem pretty basic. One thing I’ve found useful, on a mac at least (I haven’t tried any of the windows apps for this), is being able to carve out a ‘ram disk’ from a large amount of memory. I’ve had a lot of issues with Ableton’s ‘load to RAM’ option with longer sample lengths. If you have a high track count, a lot of RAM, and find that you’re running into disk speed issues, this terminal command:
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ ‘Working Drive’ `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://8388608`

Will create a 4gig drive out of RAM, then you can copy the project folder in. You just have to remember to sync it with your project on the actual hard drive periodically (or have a script to do so) since anything on a ram disk disappears if the computer loses power or crashes.

The issue is you should choose what to be running, not your OS maker – like how it is good to virus check, but having it running in the background on boot up on a audio system is a bad call. Many Windows users tweak to get the some out of the box, this is mainly due to more latency in the audio layers that forces a tweak. Macs are designed to run a riskier low latency setup as standard, as the hardware is standard and known. But Mac users are notorious for not tweaking the OS to get the most of it, just because they get a better deal in the first place – and in general don’t know much about the hardware. It doesn’t matter what OS you are running, you should always strip it back to be doing the things you what it to be doing, and have no surprises. I’ve heard of a live gigs getting tripped up by software asking to check for updates!

I use a Mac and have no problems running a completely different OS install on an external drive, run as many of these as you like, simply plug em in and choose which one to boot into at startup.

There’s a HDD image app called Super Duper & it really is Super Duper – it lets you easily swap images around as you like. It’s also great for backups and for trying out and throughly testing an OS or app update before committing to your main drive – absolutely essential if you rely on your computer for professional work.

At £35 for a decent external 500Gb drive it’s almost rude not to have a dedicated install 😉

Good tip with the DVD drive!