Ram vs Expansion packs

Wow did you know that the more "Expansion" pack you have on your MPC LIVE (and I can only guess X as well) the more ram it take up in standalone mode? But if you just move them to a separate folder on the same drive the issue is no longer present.
Akai, what's with that?

Each expansion contains a 'cache' file, image and XML file, so they are probably all scanned and loaded upon boot up so the expansions are available to view in the browser. How much memory impact are you seeing? I would have thought it would be negligible, maybe around 1MB or less per pack.

Like Tutor said how much memory are you losing? I have about 60 expansions I made but left them on the pc and haven’t ported them over to standalone yet.

Yeah I had a ton of them. Probably 60 or more and it was way in the red. I couldn't even load a simple small project without it aborting the load up. I move them all over to another folder and the Akai(tm) ones to another separate folder and rebooted back into standalone mode the ram was completely empty. I even tried with firmware v 2.1, 2.2, and the latest 2.2.2.1. I'm currently running 2.1 due to the xy effect issue.
Having all of those pictures at the ready must take a toll on the unit.
@kaydigi If you Export your whole lot let us know how it came out for you.

AWW~NAWW wrote:Yeah I had a ton of them. Probably 60 or more and it was way in the red. I couldn't even load a simple small project without it aborting the load up. I move them all over to another folder and the Akai(tm) ones to another separate folder and rebooted back into standalone mode the ram was completely empty. I even tried with firmware v 2.1, 2.2, and the latest 2.2.2.1. I'm currently running 2.1 due to the xy effect issue.
Having all of those pictures at the ready must take a toll on the unit.
@kaydigi If you Export your whole lot let us know how it came out for you.

Man you just scared me off from doing it.

On a empty project with 16 Expansions installed the RAM indicator is a little above the the first tick. CPU is sitting at 2%.

These are official akai expansions that I just converted. I will install some third party ones during the week.

AWW~NAWW wrote:Yeah I had a ton of them. Probably 60 or more .

Are these homebrew expansions? Take a look at the pack image sizes, have they been optimised? Each one should be well under 500k IMO, but if it's an un-optimised PNG it could literally be something huge like 50MB per image.

MPC-Tutor wrote:

AWW~NAWW wrote:Yeah I had a ton of them. Probably 60 or more .

Are these homebrew expansions? Take a look at the pack image sizes, have they been optimised? Each one should be well under 500k IMO, but if it's an un-optimised PNG it could literally be something huge like 50MB per image.

You may have a point there. I counted my total number of expansions and I have 81.
I'll have to go through and maybe resize or change the format completely of each image.

I can confirm that Expansion 'preview' images can drain system memory and slow down (or even disable) boot up. I wrote an article about it here.

MPC-Tutor wrote:I can confirm that Expansion 'preview' images can drain system memory and slow down (or even disable) boot up. I wrote an article about it here.

Washed I had saw this earlier. I was just about to write how I had to dither down the size of each picture. A couple pictures were 20mb one was like 86mb.

Once this painstaking process was completed, my issue of the low memory warning had been resolved.

Another thing to note is, converting a"png" format vs a "jpeg" takes a little more work. Something about the"png" format won't let you just simply replace the old file with a new one. You have to drag the expansion into the expansion bulder, replace the old picture within that environment, and then rebuild the expansion.

Thanks you both for the info, insight, and knowledge.
Peace