OK, the last few gigs I've started having some audio drop outs, this is a more-than-capable machine, and an upgrade from a system I've been using for a few years that never had any issue.
I know this is a common question, and I have searched through several old posts but I still have some specific questions.
Tech specs:
Win 7 64 bit
Live 8.3.4 32 bit
i7-3630QM
8 gigs ram
wireless and onboard sound are disabled
Focusrite 8i6 external interface
First, is there a log I can check from the last time ableton was run and if so what should I look for in regards to drop outs? I haven't opened ableton since the gig last night.
Could deleting the decoding cache also help?
My set is fairly large in terms of scenes and samples, but it's typically only 8 tracks max with usually only about 6 playing. I think it's about 2 gigs worth of samples. It should be all wavs, I've reimported anything that was decoded from mp3s or other formats.
There are two small /simple drum racks one instance of operator and one VST synth that I use very sparingly.
I have a 7200 RPM HD, I'm pretty sure I just run at 16 / 44 sample rate. My clips maybe a mix of 16 and 24 bit however.
My soundcard asio buffer is set very low (2ms) so this is obviously the first thing I will change, I've been pushing this machine to see how much it can handle.
I am running a guitar through the external input of my soundcard and it is set up through an "external instrument" device in ableton, so it's on a midi track. When I experienced audio drop outs it was only on one or some of the tracks, but the external input / guitar never dropped out.
sometimes the disk icon would flash orange, but not every time there was a drop out.
I have an EQ 8 that I have the low and high poles mapped to sliders to I can do high pass and low pass filtering, sometimes the display would freeze (around the time of a drop out) is this related to anything that could be causing my problems?
I recently put a limiter on my master, could the limiter be choking from too much input?
So I plan to turn off the limiter, maybe add the samples like main melodies, bass and vocals to RAM and up my hardware ASIO buffer.
Any other suggestions? Things I should try?
Would running a 64 bit version of live (8.4 or 9) and loading ALL the samples into RAM be a solution or would that create new problems?
thanks!