Enable Ableton for me

February 21, 2011 6:21 PM

[AbletonLiveFilter]Is the fact that many of my samples/wavs/VST plugins are on an external hard drive the reason that Live is quitting on me?

Keeping most of my samples on an external hard drive, but saving Live sets to my PC's hard drive. I've been putting together a piece that uses samples and wavs from an external hard-drive (including some one-hit drum sounds and short audio vox clips). My lead synth and bass line are on the internal hard-drive.

I'll get about 20 seconds into my song, and "Program has stopped working...Windows will look for a solution...blah, blah, blah."

I'm not using too much of my processor/virtual memory (i7 processor running 6GB of RAM). I can't seem to suss out what I'm doing wrong/different.

posted by kuanes to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

It's possible if you're external drive is slow (or the usb/fw connection is shared with other high traffic devices) that Windows (and therefore Live) trips up but that's essentially the setup I have one a MacBPro and no problem in the sw like that.
posted by victors at 6:42 PM on February 21, 2011

Have you thought of using the 'collect all and save' function? Of course it would mean that those samples would be saved in the project folder and you wouldn't need to use the external drive... which is perhaps not what you're looking for.
posted by palacewalls at 8:40 PM on February 21, 2011

What version of ableton?
posted by empath at 9:32 PM on February 21, 2011

Often a computer with multiple, seemingly alike, USB ports will have one, or some, wired as direct connections -- and the others wired as if they went through an external hub. If you can figure out which is a direct one, use that. Use the other ones for keyboard, mouse, etc.
posted by StickyCarpet at 11:09 PM on February 21, 2011

i've done something similar, only using an external drive with a Mac - haven't seen that error message. I would try "File" "collect all and save" on just that session, and see if you still have the problem.


Does this happen with any other sessions?
posted by dubold at 2:21 AM on February 22, 2011