Ableton Forum

I have a situation where I run Live without a monitor or keyboard and need to get Live to always use my preferred audio interface (RME FireFace UCX via USB) whenever it is available. This is important because sometimes I need to unplug the audio interface while the computer is running, and if Live is open at this time it will forget the audio interface requiring me to use Remote Desktop to change the setting once I've reconnected the interface.

Thoughts? I'm running on windows using RME's ASIO driver.

Thanks!

I'm chiming in here with the same problem. Getting tired of going into the prefs to select the interface when reconnecting. Should be an easy fix, ey?

– Alex

I hate to say it, but every single DAW I have ever used does the same thing when you disconnect the interface...you have to restart the program, in some cases you have to reboot. So don't do it, doh.

It's not a flaw of Ableton but rather the OS and audio/MIDI drivers.

doghouse wrote:It's not a flaw of Ableton but rather the OS and audio/MIDI drivers.

I disgree. Every DAW out there has the capacity to listen to an event for when an audio device is added or removed, and can choose whether or not to provide a feature to store the name of a preferred device and to re-enable it whenever it is available. It is the choice of the DAW developer not to provide such a feature. for example, as I recall from being an audio developer myself the JUCE audio/MIDI library includes this feature by default. I don't believe that the behavior of the audio drivers themselves influences this at all.

doghouse wrote:I hate to say it, but every single DAW I have ever used does the same thing when you disconnect the interface...you have to restart the program, in some cases you have to reboot. So don't do it, doh.

It's not a flaw of Ableton but rather the OS and audio/MIDI drivers.

Not so fast. There may be a good reason, but I don't buy that. Please explain why every other media app selects the interface when available? At least in OS X. I'd expect it to do the same in Windows too, but haven't tried.

Internal audio remembers and switches, VLC switches if there's no current video running. And so on.

alexdecker wrote:Should be an easy fix, ey?
– Alex

No fix is "easy" when you support several major versions of fast moving operating systems.

Stromkraft wrote:

alexdecker wrote:Should be an easy fix, ey?
– Alex

No fix is "easy" when you support several major versions of fast moving operating systems.

Agreed. As a former music software developer the biggest challenge by far is supporting so many platforms. The complexity of developing a VST/AU/RTAS in different hosts on different platforms with different architectures is almost prohibitively high. I'm happy to be going into psychology after 15 years of software

I wonder if there is some way to create some kind of virtual or proxy audio device that always exists so that Live doesn't have to change it's setting, and then the virtual or proxy software will automatically revert to the hardware when it's plugged in. Anyone heard of something like this before?

patrickstinson wrote:I wonder if there is some way to create some kind of virtual or proxy audio device that always exists so that Live doesn't have to change it's setting, and then the virtual or proxy software will automatically revert to the hardware when it's plugged in. Anyone heard of something like this before?

Putting a piece of software between my DAW and my audio interface drivers? Not a priority.

Stromkraft wrote: Putting a piece of software between my DAW and my audio interface drivers? Not a priority.

Yeah this isn't ideal if it adds latency. Lowest latency is critical for me as I'm playing with live instruments and trying to play in time with multi-tap delays, etc. For example jack would do that since it has it's own internal callback. Not sure though.

Stromkraft wrote:Please explain why every other media app selects the interface when available? At least in OS X. I'd expect it to do the same in Windows too, but haven't tried.

Even on OS X I sometimes must launch Audio/MIDI Setup and cycle power on the interface to have it properly recognized. Once in a while I even have to reboot the Mac. When I was using Windows XP it was worse in that it happened more often. None of my interfaces are class compliant which is why I suspect it is driver related.

That's just my personal experience, if it never happens to you that's great.

doghouse wrote:
Even on OS X I sometimes must launch Audio/MIDI Setup and cycle power on the interface to have it properly recognized. Once in a while I even have to reboot the Mac. When I was using Windows XP it was worse in that it happened more often. None of my interfaces are class compliant which is why I suspect it is driver related.

That's just my personal experience, if it never happens to you that's great.

None of that has happened to me with any interface. VLC does complain that my speakers aren't set up in Audio/MIDI even as they are, but that's just a small nuisance in the VLC log not related to music making.

That Live won't auto select a preferred interface instead of the internal is quite irritating indeed.

I wrote up a comprehensive description of my setup here: http://vedanamedia.com/2015/01/ableton-pedalboard/.

I you jump to the PC automation section it has a link to download the script to set the audio interface when my RME FireFace UCX is plugged in.