Utitlity for turning Live into your Windows Shell

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 7:44 pm

spiderprod wrote:
sweetjesus wrote:
spiderprod wrote:i have tryed photoshop ,flash mx , soundforge & a few games .
this is sick , start the pc ,puff live comes up .it will probably stop me getting frustrated at start up .

in terms of performance it saves me around 6% of cpu ,& to my big surprise it free up around 20 meg of ram .
tryed on xp sp2

thanks again .
dude that's really awesome to hear!
wow
i have the feeling somethink is wrong when i am in normal mode cos 20 meg of ram is a lot .
do you know what can pump 20 meg of ram ?

- Start Menu heiarchy and all its associated icons
- Clock running
- System tray
- Graphical task bar
- Full version of explorer which is also a browser persistent in your memory

anti-banausic · Post by **anti-banausic** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 7:48 pm

I would believe that explorer takes that much RAM, plus, there are a few processes that aren't turned on with the initial boot that I would need, such as that for my nostromo....

But the beauty is...you can just go into the task manager and run the processes that you need, while avoiding those that you don't.

Like this....

the scroll button on my track pad wouldn't work, so go into task manager and run the program for the trackpad, then voila...it is up and running.

This is pretty sweet. Have to thank sweetjesus alot for this one.

I will check in a little while when I am back in the studio as to increased performance.

Cheers,
AB

chis · Post by **chis** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 7:49 pm

And explorer extensions!

You see, little things like this eat away at RAM. No wonder XP runs so poorly with anything less than 384MB RAM!

That extra 20MB is essential to me! That's worth a whole pad sample! (Chis PadsTM)

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 8:13 pm

spiderprod wrote: i have the feeling somethink is wrong when i am in normal mode cos 20 meg of ram is a lot .
do you know what can pump 20 meg of ram ?

I guess you are in a normal boot now.
If so, hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager and look at the processes tab.

Explorer - 20,520k

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 8:27 pm

Angstrom wrote:
spiderprod wrote: i have the feeling somethink is wrong when i am in normal mode cos 20 meg of ram is a lot .
do you know what can pump 20 meg of ram ?
I guess you are in a normal boot now.
If so, hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager and look at the processes tab.

Explorer - 20,520k

My explorer shows 26MB and also as a note, ctrl + shift + esc is a quicker way to bring up task manager.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 8:28 pm

When I doubleclick the .exe on both my Internet computer and my laptop I get the message:

"Component 'comdlg32.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 8:36 pm

djsynchro wrote:When I doubleclick the .exe on both my Internet computer and my laptop I get the message:

"Component 'comdlg32.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

You're experiencing a technical anomaly.

Go to this link and there's some solutions for your problem. Sounds like a corrupt file on your computers behalf. Appratantly this happens sometimes on Windows install.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:iv03 ... =firefox-a

EDIT: i think this happens when you omit a certain part of the windows install. In the furture I will include this file with the .exe.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:13 pm

Thanks man!

So far it works on my Internet computer. (Windows XP pro SP1) with a demo of Live. This is where I test free VSTs etc. before they go on the music PC. It ran the Live performance test marginally faster, but this is not a music computer.

Will let you know how it works on my laptop.

[EDIT]

Works on my laptop, XP home SP2 but if anything it's a tiny bit SLOWER (I get 32% on the performance test, when running Live as a shell the meter will sometimes show 33%)
I did strip XP down to the bare bones already so maybe there's nothing to be gained for me? All the internet & networking stuff is disabled, Wireless LAN is even switched off in the BIOS.

Tried starting with live as shell, exiting the utility. No gain

spiderprod · Post by **spiderprod** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 11:30 pm

this thing just gave me an idea ,i have a spare laptop in the studio ,i could run fx teleport with the shell on the spare laptop , that would make my spare laptop working like a dedicated dsp processor .
the loading time of fx teleport was a pain at the time ,this shell can make things work my way & run lots of the waves plugins i can't use on the powercore .
the loading time of the spare pc was what made me stop using teleport .
i am not back in the studio until sunday so i guess i'll have this thing in my head untill i try or someone try it for me .

nolus · Post by **nolus** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 12:32 am

Absolutely fucking fantastic!

The most demanding thing I have is Ivory Piano VST. the sound files for it are on a usb2 drive and the audio card is a firewire 410.

up until today I had to limit myselfe to 4 velocity layers and not use the sustain peddle too much, etc, and after a while it would start cracking and breaking up. so I just tried it with your shell and it plays an 8 layer patch completely without any trace of a problem, and even get a perfectly playable performance from the 10 layer samples as long as I don't hold too many notes with the sustain peddle. this is definately the way to go, just amazing really. Ive even just reduced the buffer size from 256 down to 64 samples and it still plays the 10 layer patch perfectly, and I was ready to throw another 1Gb of ram at it as well

I can't thank you enough for this!

P.S.

did you know that from within live you can launch any program on your system

Just select "Visit ableton.com..." from the help menu. When the browser window opens type "c:\" into the address bar and your away!

forge · Post by **forge** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 3:17 am

nolus wrote: P.S.
did you know that from within live you can launch any program on your system
Just select "Visit ableton.com..." from the help menu. When the browser window opens type "c:" into the address bar and your away!

this is just a tip fest all round! thanks (although I just do it from task manager>new task)

Sweetjesus: I REALLY like the sound of your idea of shutting off services as well - really love to try it!

I was really hoping this would stop the blue screens I've been getting (quite frequent lately) but sadly I got another one last night so as I suspected it's the QLD summer that's doing it - it's just overheating - I've even took it apart to clean out the lint but it was pretty clear. It's just this damn humidity. It does it when it's set to always on and I give it a demanding live set D'OH!

Anubis · Post by **Anubis** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 3:39 am

This is an awesome tweak SJ. I have been tempted to upgrade to XP Pro just for this feature. I will soon work up the nerve to try it on my music notebook PC.

I just have one question.(forgive my ignorance if it's too stupid) Does this tweak still let me run other music apps via Rewire?

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 3:57 am

Anubis wrote:This is an awesome tweak SJ. I have been tempted to upgrade to XP Pro just for this feature. I will soon work up the nerve to try it on my music notebook PC.

I just have one question.(forgive my ignorance if it's too stupid) Does this tweak still let me run other music apps via Rewire?

So far this has only been tested on XP Home, would love to see if it works for XP Pro.

It will let you run other audio apps as rewire yes. I will make some tweaks to the app soon to allow for people to choose more than one program to launch in succession of their choosing to making rewiring a bit more straightforward.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 4:05 am

TIP: Until I extend its functionality, you can get my program to do more complicated launching of programs by creating a batch file and selecting that when you hit the "Choose Shell" button in my utility.

Here's a link to a help you get started with batch files: http://www.computerhope.com/batch.htm

You can make a file using notpad called c:\mybatch.bat and in there you can have the following lines:

c:\Program Files\Ableton\Live 5.0.3\Program\Live 5.0.3.exe
pause
C:\Program Files\energyXT\standalone.exe

this example would launch Live, then wait for a keypress in the DOS box then launch Energy XT...

Anubis · Post by **Anubis** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 5:24 am

sweetjesus wrote:TIP: Until I extend its functionality, you can get my program to do more complicated launching of programs...

Dude, you know if you keep this up you're bound to attract the attention of the corporate police and MS wiil dispatch a squad of Gates' Goons to go fetch you and haul you off to some Hostel in the woods of Redmond