Live Performance-How does DP use Memory and Best Computer to use?

[JLEpperson]

I currently use an Macbook Pro M1 with SD drive and 32gb ram. Our band has 260 song loaded in a chunks with average of 400mb per song. My computer is starting to crash and becoming sluggish with the last 10 songs I loaded.

1st question: How does DP handle the memory, does it load all the songs into ram or reads them directly from the drive. Currently my DP session is about 60gb.

2nd question: What is the best apple laptop to use to handle this easily and room for more songs?

[Tidwells@aol.com]

Hi, JLE!

I don't have answers to all your questions but I can offer a couple of suggestions to make your current computer setup work better, which may be obvious things you have already tried, or not....

1. If you can raise the buffer setting to a higher number in DP, this will take some load off of your computer. The only bad side effect of this is that if you are running any live audio through DP during your show, the latency of those tracks will increase. There may also be a split-second more of delay when you hit "play" before a track starts.

2. If your SSD is getting close to 90% full, this can bog down your computer and cause sluggish behavior and crashes. You might "clean house" by dragging some old unused files to trash, then emptying trash. Then re-start your computer. If TRIM is not enabled on your SSD, it might take a day or so before all of the extra SSD space is all available for use.

3. If you are using MIDI tracks and virtual instruments tracks in your songs, you may be able to "lighten the load" on your computer by using the "Freeze Tracks" function to convert those tracks to simple audio tracks, which seem to use less CPU power, then turn off the "play enable" button for the original VI track, which will lighten the CPU load. If you need to edit the track later, you can still re-enable it, make the desired changes, then re-freeze it and disable it again....I have found that if I'm not running any VI tracks, the number of simple audio tracks that DP can play back without "choking" is ridiculously high....

Doug

[mikehalloran]

Doug's tips are good though enabling TRIM only applies to 2.5" external SSDs — it's enabled by default otherwise.

A 32GB M1 is plenty powerful but we need more info including how much onboard storage (internal SSD) you have and how full is it. Are you using an external drive; if so, what is it and do you have a link?

Also, are you running live through DP along with backing tracks? What is your buffer setting? How are you loading songs — Chunks, Tracks, Projects, Other? Are you loading multiple VIs on one instance, using an instance for each VI, using Kontakt?

There will likely be more questions after this round.