Out Of Memory Error

Help, Support & Bugs
1

the following applies to both, renoise 1.8 and renoise 1.9beta.
i am not sure if it’s a bug or just a malconfiguration of my winxp, so feel free to move this to beginners questions incase it’s not renoise’s fault ;)

so i am running WinXP Pro SP2 and a PC with 2GB of RAM.
here’s what my ram load looks like in certain situations:
on desktop/in browser:
622MB used / 1.426MB free
after launching renoise:
677MB used / 1.370MB free
after loading w.i.p. song:
866MB used / 1.181MB free
after loading a 21:52 minute 44khz 16bit mp3 vocal sample(btw: this takes ages, and CPU+HDD do both chill whilst loading)
1.316MB used / 731MB free

now i go into sample editor, disable undo for it, and cut a little piece from the long sample.
my primary harddrive (the one with the pagefile) will work for a few seconds until renoise presents me the “out of memory” error message.
my physical memory has never been fuller than 1.322MB though, so i wonder why the remaining ~720MB remain unused?
it feels like i am having 2GB but can only use 70% of them.
is this renoise’s fault or winxp’s?
my pagefile is set to 2048MB btw - but why should the OS want to swap stuff if there still is plenty of physical memory available?
but my main concern is, what’s up with the remaining 720+ MB…

ps:
i have already seen other apps (games) occupying my entire physical memory (company of heroes, for example) - so it seems like the OS is at least capable of using it all if the applications demands to do so…

2

That seem somewhat familiar, thing is i think it only happened when i had quicktime installed.
What if you convert the mp3 file to .wav… still happens when quicktime is out of the way ?

// codec

3

well, i have quicktime installed so i did the .wav conversion beforehand. now renoise even tells me before it actually starts loading anything that i was out of memory… and that’s with more than 1GB of free physical memory.

4

The problem is that there must be one large continues block free in memory. The free memory indicator just counts up all free memory pieces. The more the memory is fragmented, the more often this will happen.

All we could do to avoid this (we will do some when) is to simply avoid allocating such large continues chunks. Either by splitting the sample into smaller part or reading such large samples directly from disk.

So sorry, nothing that we could “fix” for now…

5

thanks for the info.
at least it makes sense now.

6

What is the difference in managing RAM between renoise and other sequencers? How can they manage a better use of memory and renoise can’t? Tons of samples can be loaded in even simpler sequencers like Adobe Audition…