Is it normal that Ableton can't handle 100 track stems?

[tooneba]

did you turn off stretch? Realtime stretch takes CPU power.

[whyterabbyt]

@frenchboy: forgive me man but if for stems you mean bus o sub bus, why do you need all this busses??? 6 Orchestras orgy??? o.O

a stem is a stem, why would I mean bus

Stems are also sometimes referred to as submixes, subgroups, or busses

I reckon its probably not obvious what you mean by '100 track stems' though, as a track is a defined thing and a stem is a different defined thing, namely an already-mixed group of tracks. Since very few DAWS define 'stems' as a thing, the means of previewing/mixing a stem is potentially via a bus (cf Aux Bus in ProTools), ie a bus is the mechanism by which creating stems is implemented.
Ableton has no 'stems' or 'track stems' either, I believe.

Since you say you have '100 track stems', and '100 tracks', it would seem that you're using the term 'track stem' as a synonym for 'track', perhaps in a manner unfamiliar to people here, hence the confusion. If you perhaps restated the question with more detail, and a clarification of the terminology, it might help.

[tooneba]

Less is more, and no FL won't handle it. Your CPU will buckle. What will handle something like this is Reaper. I know. I've done this.

at least 70 tracks is no problem 4 years ago. isn't it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr0JjR_wVqQ

[elxsound]

100 channels of audio is probably chewing into your RAM.

Also your hard drive is way too full %

Ram usage shows 1.5gigs. Isn't the max 4 gigs with 32 bit?

What % of my drive should be empty and why?

I'm surprised that RAM usage only shows at 1.5GB for 100 audio tracks. If so, I assume that much of the work is being done with the swap space, in which case the nearly full HDD is probably causing you issues.

I have a very similar machine to yours in terms of specs (albeit running Windows 8.1), and I have had no problems with large numbers of audio tracks, but I have a lot more free space on my HDD than you do. Lack of space on HDD is definitely going to affect performance in one way or another.

I used to have similar issues, but adopted the practice of keeping audio/projects all on separate drives (other than my main HD). And allow me to inject a bit of speculation on my part, as I've also adopted the practice of never going over 50% full. I say speculation because it was something I've read and heard repeatedly, and never researched a reason why to do so... But it seems to be beneficial (but again I do not have proof why). Maybe someone else if willing could provide more info on this (or debunk it as irrelevant if so).

On another note, what Whyterabbit said is absolutely correct. "Stems" in my experience are not used synonymously as tracks. Stems are referred to as mixed down groups of tracks (like all drums, mixed to one stem). This is usually done by creating busses (like in ProTools) and in Live it is referred to as Groups (a much easier/cleaner process than ProTools) but still technically a bus has been created and the "grouped" tracks are routed to it.

[HobbyCore]

Less is more, and no FL won't handle it. Your CPU will buckle. What will handle something like this is Reaper. I know. I've done this.

That's odd. I tried the _exact same group of tracks_ that Live wouldn't hand in FLStudio, and it worked just fine. I've tried that project in every 'current' daw that runs on windows with a demo and only Live 9 could not even play the wave files by itself. Even n-track worked fine... shortly before crashing when I touched a channel fader

Either way, this doesn't help the OP at all. Turning off auto-warp may help though.

[ezelkow1]

^

Start setting tracks to be in ram to relieve the strain on the hdd, may as well use as much ram as you can since you have it there. Like others said also disable warping options if you dont need it, having 100 tracks warped would probably suck up alot of cpu

[pdxindy]

I figured but I thought I'd ask.........you know........just in case

If I was doing sequencing stuff and I didn't prefer OS X, I would definitely use FLStudio though.

OSX version of FL Studio is on the way...

[frenchboy]

By stems I mean, I exported 100 tracks to audio to prepare for mixing, and imported them into ableton. There's nothing else on the project than 100 audio tracks with no effect on them. I thought that was pretty obvious. When you send your production to be mixed you bounce the stems and send them to the mixing engineer.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

Might not be what you want to hear but on mac for large track counts, Logic is one of the very best. It just knows how to shuffle and handle. I've played 256 audio tracks on a laptop with just two 7200rpm drives, less powerful laptop, no SSD's, and not a single sweat or dropout.

[V0RT3X]

^ That's one reason why i switched to Logic. I can't load the Logic X "Helena Beat" project without it getting a error saying my computer is not fast enough though..

[Morgaxx]

Were all 100 tracks exported from the project start to end? If so I would imagine you have a lot of silence in many of those tracks that is being 'played' needlessly. Be sure to delete all the silence if you have not already.

[BDeep]

Besides performance, if only for pure mixing, I would use Logic any day over Live.... (note: I'm an avid (no pun etc) Live user these days).

@OP, I know that doesn't help you much. Although I would suggest you follow the advice given here to turn off audio warping, clean up your drive a little and maybe you'll benefit from launching the 64bit version of Live as well.
If that fails, well, then I guess that would answer the question, no, apparently Live can't handle 100 audio tracks with your configuration. Actually, it just doesn't seem built with that in mind.

[hibidy]

I figured but I thought I'd ask.........you know........just in case

If I was doing sequencing stuff and I didn't prefer OS X, I would definitely use FLStudio though.

OSX version of FL Studio is on the way...

I loaded the x64 version of FL studio last night and was ready to uninstall it within 5 minutes I know I don't "know" how to use it but mostly it just frustrates me. And thought I haven't pushed a project really hard, CPU use still seems poor to me.

[camsr]

You must have all your stems at the host's sampling rate AND bitdepth. If the host is resampling while playing them back, there will be a major CPU hit. And no audio warping, obviously. Whether to load stems into RAM or not is system dependent, better to try both and see which works best.

Hibidy, all the options for this stuff is in the channel settings.

[osiris]

TBF, this was an experiment I decided to do on a big CPU project, so the tracks were bounced to audio BUT This was an actual mixdown with effects on the master and on the busses. Maybe no effects, fine.
But Reaper would load more audio with effects and used WAY less CPU.
I also remember this was awhile ago, possibly before the Keep On Disk was the norm. I'm also sure these were 24 and 32 bit files being turned to 16 bit, so this explains a lot. Thanks for the tips guys.