added ram in Mpc Live

Ultros wrote:If you use a custom rom you could mount a swap partition and "disk thrash" for ram. It will allow you to get around the 2gb ram limitation.

for those unfamiliar with the idea of swap space, its a virtual memory partition (on disk aka hdd sd ssd) where ram overflows too when your physical ram chips become full.

The throughput of the disk used for swap matters here. your ram chip has a higher bandwidth than most of your plugable storage medias but for those with a sata controller and internal disk drive this should work decently. (like the OP with a live.)

Do any of your customizations do this?

This would be akin to a computer using the Virtual-Memory Swap-File.
In short, it **kills** performance.

A SATA SSD sustains ~540MB/Sec.
That's painfully slow compared to DDR3, DDR4, DDR5.
Even a M.2 SSD is slow compared to RAM.

There's no way to expand the RAM of an MPC unit.
If you don't want to be bound by its hardware limitations, use the software on a DAW (computer).

swap files don't kill performance in general, Because the data is ordered it can be much more efficient to load data from a swap file than from random sectors on a hard disk drive. Even if you've got an SSD, a swap file can still help extend memory by letting the operating system offload unused memory and let it rest on disk in a steady state that can be retrieved when necessary. I'll grant you that going over the USB bus for swap is not ideal, and having direct access from CPU to disk would be better... but swap doesn't have to act like RAM to be useful.

So sure, technically you are right that HDD/SSD is slower than RAM, I'll grant you that... but implementing virtual memory does not immediately cause you performance issues, and in the vast majority of use cases it helps in memory constrained situations because you are not using all of your memory all of the time. The MPC is *not* going to be accessing the full 2gb of memory at the same time, so swap here is probably one of the most ideal use cases because the kernel has plenty of time to decide what makes sense to send to disk or not to disk.

Luca Pierma wrote:This is very sad,
if I use the samples in mono, then playing them in the master out L and R in live session, will they sound in stereo?

If your live session is in a club, then chances are that that system is mono anyway. Almost all club systems are mono for various reasons. One is that you get the exact same sound no matter where in the club you are. So go mono if it’s live and make sure your sound is mixed well for mono. Also if your live session is in a cafe or some other venue you want to go mono, too. Because if you don’t and play a stereo set with lots of stereo effects, then part of the crowd might not even hear what you are doing because the sound system is spaced weirdly or one channel is not working or whatever.
If you still need more ram then do as the others said. Get a Key61 or a Force.

NearTao wrote:swap files don't kill performance in general,

I've built DAWs professionally for nearly 30 years.
If you don't have enough physical RAM for your largest projects... and the machine starts heavily hitting the VM Swapfile, it most definitely will kill performance.

Don't believe it, try loading a massive scoring session on a machine with 16GB RAM.
All of our clients composing for TV/Film are running a minimum of 64GB... most are using 128GB.
VM Swapfile is not a viable substitute for having enough physical RAM.

@Jim Roseberry... my "in general" was a blanket statement that the swap file itself isn't what is killing the performance... having a swap file enabled does not inherently cause a computer to run poorly.

So sure, I get your point and your experience... We could argue semantics all day... but in my opinion it isn't the swap file killing performance in your example, it's the workflow and project. As we both know, a swapfile is not some magic bullet and it isn't going to get you more active ram... a swap file does not replace ram. I'll still argue that for many use cases, especially on an MPC, you're not using the full amount of memory concurrently, and that allowing the operating system to manage memory and a swap file together can be a performance benefit for many cases.

If you're using high end professional gear, you're going to hit high end professional limits. Somebody who is using a DAW, and loading up hundreds of plugins that require hundreds of gigs of memory are not going to be able to fit their projects into 16GB of RAM and a 100+GB swap file... or rather they could, but yes, the performance will likely be awful.

Even if you've got 128GB of memory, you're still likely to want to have a swap file though, as it lets the operating system have more memory management options and more gracefully manage memory usage and contention spikes.

Hi,
Sorry for resurrecting a dead post.
I just bought a ‘17 MPC X.
I have a 128GB MicroSD coming for the internal memory, a 240GB SSD, and a 128GB SD memory card coming for it.
How do I make this “swap file” to the internal MicroSD that I’m gonna upgrade to?
Thanks!

You don't. Forget about the whole thing. They're talking about big computer systems, not MPC. Nothing to see here.