Ableton Forum

Hello, I'm running a TI powerbook (550 MHZ ,768 RAM, 5 gigs available on internal hard drive, OS 10.2) and Playback is completely distorted (pops, clicks, very sloooow). The current set has 6 loops. Each loop is about 1 meg in size. I am also using delay and reverb on about half of the loops. What is causing this? None of my other audio software is behaving this way.

In Live's Audio Preferences, you can increase the buffer size. That's probably your problem. It will add some latency, but if you set it just right, you can have a good compromise...

-lowbot

Thanks for the tip. I did that this morning and achieved better results. Still can't play more than 5 loops though. Any idea if a soundcard would help instead of core audio?

J-C

By it's nature, Live tries to sync any sound to the current bpm. It breaks the sounds into virtual pieces to get that effect. Perhaps your loops are out of thier native bpm, and so you could match Live's bpm to theirs to achieve the smoothest sound... (sorry if don't realize you are already proficient in Live )...

As for sound cards, while I don't have a cardbus sound card (I'm on a Ti-book 667), I do have a Tascam us-428 that performs really well in Jaguar and Live...

-lowbot

Lowbot,
Do you ever get dropouts or glitches using the 428? Or freezes or crashes? Ever? And what settings do you use? 24bit/96khz? 16bit/44.1khz?
Just curious,
Geraldo

Geraldo,

I use the 24-bit, 44100 hz setting... So far, in os X, it's been fine. I never hardly have a glitch, but one must never say never.

Overall, I think it's great.

-lowbot

isn't the 550 one of the stinky powerbooks for audio, something about the cache? i dunno, ask tjwett, he's got the skinny. you may be mildly screwed.

the reverb that your using, are you using it on a send track or one for each track? abletons reverb (as silky-smooth-sexy as is it) eats up cpu like it's going out of style. if you're using one on each track, try using just one instance on a send track and bussing your signals over to it. if you haven't already, try downgrading the reverb's render quality (first class/coach/economy). that should get things sounding better.

of course if you're already doing all this and i've just fully insulted your intelligence, i polijize.


k

I have the 667, the close relative of the 550... It's cache is a little too low, true, but I've got a new 7200 rpm firewire hard drive (with an Oxford 911 bridge) that I run Live off of, and store audio information. The drive has a built-in 2 meg cache...

I saw the performance almost double with the new drive!

This has been the greatest boost to my machine, maybe you could check it out yourself...

-lowbot

I've been looking into a new drive. My 20 gig internal is filling up. Having an external drive is a hassle though (I got a laptop to avoud cables ). Would the an internal IBM drive make as significant an improvement?

The drive has 60 gigs and a 2 meg cache. But it's RPM is only 5400 not 7200 and it's pretty pricey...is anyone using an internal IBM drive?

PS: Many thanks to everyone who has been helping out on this topic!!!

Yeah, the drive's a little bit of a hassle. But it's just not possible to achieve 7200 rpm speeds with an internal drive.

You're right about the cable clutter. I also bought a Tibook for that reason...

-lowbot

and I thought I was buying a "supercomputer"....How much ram are you using? I have 756 megs and I'm not sure filling it out at 1 gig will make a difference. Should I spend on the drive before ram?

You don't need any more ram! Save that for a hard drive... I have 512 mb, and I'm doing okay...

You know, in the end (of all your woes), I think the fault lies with Live. They need to jump on the Altivec-programmed thing to bring the program up to snuff...

I bet, in a year, we'll all be extremely happy with whatever Ableton and Apple have to offer (maybe)....

-lowbot

I agree, None of my other audio apps have caused this much trouble. I guess we're just not there yet...