I have a really huge session (1,200+ audio tracks) and I have an issue with some of the audio tracks not building waveform images. I tried deleting the Images folder, and that fixed it for a while but still occasionally tracks are frozen with the “Image under construction…” message. I know I can try to manually rebuild the images but its a ton of individual files that aren’t drawing, and I’d rather not rebuild images one-by-one. Any tips on this?
1200+ audio tracks!? I think the most probable cause would be that you run into disk performance limitation, even with a dedicated SSD? And especially if you use 48 to 96 khz and have a lot of tracks play simultaneously. The maximum speed for the Sata2 bus is 6GB per second but most SSD’s itself can only handle around 500MB per second. Only the newer M2 models can be like 6 times faster. But these values are only achieved with reading large sequential files. With random read/write, as with this type of data, the real time performance can quickly jump below 100MB per second. However, most of it will be stored in RAM and that can quite easily process this amount of data but it needs to be kept up to date after so many cycles so that also means considerable disk activity which makes it also partly dependent on the disk performance.
To test if it’s indeed a performance limitation you could mute say a hundred tracks and see if things speed up. If not try to mute more? Besides this I can’t think of any quick fix for this at the moment other than maybe start to merge as many tracks as you can to limit the number of wav files?
You’re right, if they were all simultaneous I would overload SATA. They are not simultaneously running audio and most of the tracks just have a single sound effect on them. The session might only have 20 tracks actively streaming audio at any one time. So you think if I put the session on an SSD that would fix the image issue? Sometimes it takes 5 minutes of “Image under construction” before the waveform appears or it never draws the image at all.