Crackling sound when playing midi live

[Able-to]

Hey guys,
Quite new to the ableton world. i am the only keyboarder in a band and i play tracks and live-sounds live through my macbook pro (late 11', i7, 16gb RAM, 1TB internal SSD.
I have one session for our normal show: 12 songs, about 25-30 tracks, three tracks for all songs each by each, rest of the tracks is for midi sounds with external soft-synth (omnisphere, sylenth1, massive, several kontakt plugins). My cpu usage is without playing anything (no track, no midi-synth) at about 20-25%, when i play it rises to (depending on the plugin) 35-45%.
I have automated the patch changing for each song with an external instrument-rack and the chain selector. I got two midi-sending keyboards (one on channel one and one on channel two), assigned each one to track, that is routing midi to the desired midi-track with the plugins in it.
My problem: when i start a song and the desired sound it activated and i play the first note, sometimes i get a crackling and the sound is lagging, as if the plugin just loads when i play the first note. Any idea of how to get the plugins pre-load the sounds? There should be enough cpu and RAM, or not?


**edit: i use automated midi-tracks, but it not only appears on those.

[empathy1]

what is your audio interface? and what is your sampling rate in ableton?

[Able-to]

Interface: presonus firestudio project, rate: 44,1khz

[Stromkraft]

Hey guys,
Quite new to the ableton world. i am the only keyboarder in a band and i play tracks and live-sounds live through my macbook pro (late 11', i7, 16gb RAM, 1TB internal SSD.
I have one session for our normal show: 12 songs, about 25-30 tracks, three tracks for all songs each by each, rest of the tracks is for midi sounds with external soft-synth (omnisphere, sylenth1, massive, several kontakt plugins). My cpu usage is without playing anything (no track, no midi-synth) at about 20-25%, when i play it rises to (depending on the plugin) 35-45%.
I have automated the patch changing for each song with an external instrument-rack and the chain selector. I got two midi-sending keyboards (one on channel one and one on channel two), assigned each one to track, that is routing midi to the desired midi-track with the plugins in it.
My problem: when i start a song and the desired sound it activated and i play the first note, sometimes i get a crackling and the sound is lagging, as if the plugin just loads when i play the first note. Any idea of how to get the plugins pre-load the sounds? There should be enough cpu and RAM, or not?

You've been trough the aspects referred to in the help article How to avoid crackles and audio drop-outs and Chapter 32. Computer Audio Resources and Strategies in the manual?

[Able-to]

Yes. I did. All clips are in 24bit, RAM is activated, HiQ is disabled and buffer size is set to 128. so, my guess would be that its because of the midi automation that changes the track that receives the midi signal. Is there any possibility to check, if the external plugins are activated or load when playing. So can i be sure that when the track is selected that the plugin is pre-loaded, did anyone have any issues with that?

[Stromkraft]

HiQ is disabled and buffer size is set to 128. so, my guess would be that its because of the midi automation that changes the track that receives the midi signal.

Can you please describe that MIDI routing in a little more detail and what instruments in the racks that receives the change messages that is performing the changes? It's always a softsynth loading a new patch? And the time for doing this is critical?

The MIDI goes from your master keyboards to a MIDI track that in turn forward these to the track you want to use?

I know some people load every plug-in with the patch inactivated in Instrument Tracks and just activate the new device chain and inactivates the old. This might be worth trying if changing the patches themselves isn't important for some performing reason.

This is in Live 8? Or is it the HiQ switch in Sampler you're referring to?

Some things I might add, that doesn't seem particularly likely in your case, but that can cause crackles and dropouts and therefore worth checking for is CPU spikes, caused for instance by Intel Speedstep switching in*, background app kicking in automatically, internet being active and overloading one CPU core (Each track is maintained on one core and isn't spread to multiple).

Another thing would be the actual plug-in acting up, like having too many assigned voices, bugs related to MIDI or not being updated to being fully compatible with Live.

*I've turned Speedstep off in my MacBook Pro

[Pitch Black]

Side note: I question the use of 24bit files for live performance. If you were to actually utilise all 24bits of dynamic range, peoples heads would explode from the volume! I know I'm kinda sorta bending the truth here, but my point is you will reduce your RAM and CPU usage by one-third if you use 16bit files for shows.

I run a large Live set for shows with 100+ tracks and 250+ scenes, so I'll take any performance increase I can get out of the system.

If anyone can tell me why 24bit files would be totally necessary for LIVE PERFORMANCE, I'd be keen to hear.

Not trying to do a beat-up! Just wanted to suggest a system performance-enhancing strategy.

[Able-to]

Side note: I question the use of 24bit files for live performance. If you were to actually utilise all 24bits of dynamic range, peoples heads would explode from the volume! I know I'm kinda sorta bending the truth here, but my point is you will reduce your RAM and CPU usage by one-third if you use 16bit files for shows.

I run a large Live set for shows with 100+ tracks and 250+ scenes, so I'll take any performance increase I can get out of the system.

If anyone can tell me why 24bit files would be totally necessary for LIVE PERFORMANCE, I'd be keen to hear.

Not trying to do a beat-up! Just wanted to suggest a system performance-enhancing strategy.

I was recommended to use 24 bit by a fogh-guy. He said it would be noticable.. I didnt know ot would take so much of RAM and CPU. Will be a lot of work to get all tracks down to 16bit.

Can you please describe that MIDI routing in a little more detail and what instruments in the racks that receives the change messages that is performing the changes? It's always a softsynth loading a new patch? And the time for doing this is critical?

The MIDI goes from your master keyboards to a MIDI track that in turn forward these to the track you want to use?

I know some people load every plug-in with the patch inactivated in Instrument Tracks and just activate the new device chain and inactivates the old. This might be worth trying if changing the patches themselves isn't important for some performing reason.

This is in Live 8? Or is it the HiQ switch in Sampler you're referring to?

Some things I might add, that doesn't seem particularly likely in your case, but that can cause crackles and dropouts and therefore worth checking for is CPU spikes, caused for instance by Intel Speedstep switching in*, background app kicking in automatically, internet being active and overloading one CPU core (Each track is maintained on one core and isn't spread to multiple).

Another thing would be the actual plug-in acting up, like having too many assigned voices, bugs related to MIDI or not being updated to being fully compatible with Live.

*I've turned Speedstep off in my MacBook Pro

Thanks for the answer!
Midi Routing: I got one track that receives only midi from channel one (my kronos is sending on channel one) and one channel that only receives midi from channel two (akai mpk49).
The only thing thats inside of these tracks is an instrument rack with an external instrument for each song. By the chain selector i automate at the beginnign of each song to jump to the next external instrument.
In each external instrument i have a max for live device that is able to send and receive midi and defining the port number and chain number (got this technique from a youtube tutorial). So you could say port number equals the midi-channel that is about to receive and chain number is the song number.
My tracks with the soft synth loaded are grouped to have two tracks each. One for midi one and one for midi 2.
these tracks contain an instrument rack again with the needed soft synths (the track with most snynths loaded is 2 instances of ominsphere with each max 2 sounds layered and one instance of sylenth1). Each track has an instance of that max for live instance where the receive section is set to the song number i need and on which keyboard im going to play the sound.
So thats the midi-audio routing.
To avoid cpu and ram i automated to turn the instruments on and at the beginning (actually one scene before the beginning of each song) and turn it off after the last scene. so it will save the resources when not needed. I was recognizing that this reduzed my cpu usage for about 10%.

I meant the HiQ of the audio clips that is deactivated..

What is that speedstep and what does it do?

Another understanding question: is ableton deactivating tracks and plugins that are not played or that dont receive any midi information?

[Stromkraft]

Can you please describe that MIDI routing in a little more detail and what instruments in the racks that receives the change messages that is performing the changes? It's always a softsynth loading a new patch? And the time for doing this is critical?

To avoid cpu and ram i automated to turn the instruments on and at the beginning (actually one scene before the beginning of each song) and turn it off after the last scene. so it will save the resources when not needed. I was recognizing that this reduzed my cpu usage for about 10%.

I meant the HiQ of the audio clips that is deactivated..

What is that speedstep and what does it do?

Another understanding question: is ableton deactivating tracks and plugins that are not played or that dont receive any midi information?

To my knowledge inactivation is limited. In the link I referred to Ableton writes:

Live does not automatically disable unused [audio hardware] channels, because the audio hardware drivers usually produce an audible “hiccup“ when there is a request for an audio configuration change.

which indicates the need for using just the amount of channels for audio I/O that you need.

They write just after:

Generally, every track and device being used in Live incurs some amount of CPU load. However, Live is “smart“ and avoids wasting CPU cycles on tracks and devices that do not contribute anything useful.

but in practice the devices need to be in a ready state and listening so to turning unused devices off should render the best results. This is at least my experience, at least with third party VSTs.

Intel Speedstep explained (Wikipedia). I'm a bit unwilling to go back with it being active after I finally managed to inactivate it, but it seems some minor micro dropouts I had on occasion cleared up.
I believe this problem, if indeed being involved, is very specific per processor. But it has been suggested there could be issues with this and more often so for certain Intel processor models (of which there are many). You can search the forum for more.

I actually had forgotten about the HiQ setting of clips. Thanks for the reminder! I'll probably use that for recording on existing clips. Wouldn't turn it off for performance though, unless there were issues like yours.

One thing you could try is to remove stop buttons that you don't really need from the row around where you have these issues. This is usually just a problem if you group and nest many racks and tracks, but I understand some people say live performance is improved with this. I haven't tried it myself as of yet.

OK, not much conclusive. More later.

[Able-to]

Hey guys,
I think i found the main problem. My interface was doing all stuff in 48khz, my ableton was set to 44.1, that caused quite a lot of crackling and bad sounds.
No idea why it was set to 48 because i never used the 48 option.
BUT i have another problem mow: when I play midi through my korg kronos and use the sustain pedal from the kronos ( which works perfectly), but here and there i hear some crackling noises caused by the sustain pedal. Any idea why that happens? Anyone ever had a similar problem?
Thanks for your help!

[Stromkraft]

when I play midi through my korg kronos and use the sustain pedal from the kronos ( which works perfectly), but here and there i hear some crackling noises caused by the sustain pedal. Any idea why that happens? Anyone ever had a similar problem?
Thanks for your help!

What are the status of the system when this occurs? How severe is it? Sustain pedal use does increase concurrent voices in many VSTs, depending on what you play and what ther VST is and what setting it has, so check for overloads.

[spip72]

I get crackling audio in from external HW synth in when I enable sync over midi. Don't understand the logic behind this, but I've seen it with both a Mininova and a Blofeld.

[Erikvf]

I saw on one of the other "crackle and pop" posts that someone recommended going to 48kHz -- it worked!
I recorded an entire 20+ track cue in 44.1 and had to bump up to 512k buffer size in order to avoid crackling. I just changed over to 48kHz and the darn piece will playback at 256 no problem (all 20 tracks are 44.1kHz!)

Weird that 48kHz is some 'liked' more by Ableton.

Give it a try!

[Erikvf]

My problem has been solved:

My sound card is the RME AIO Card so I can't say this will work for others..but the general concept is to go ASIO and disable WDM on your DAW soundcard.

Problem: Sound is distorted at low buffer sizes. 20+ track cue needs to be played back at 512 buffer size to insure smooth undistorted sound. 512 really bad for live recording. Nothing seemed to work.


1. go RME Hamerfall DSP Settings app
2. Click WDM Devices "Configure"
3. Uncheck ALL
4. When you're done you should have a "0" showing next to the "configure" button.

That's it. Now the same cue that wouldn't playback any lower than 512 now plays back smoothly at 32 buffer size!!

(MAC users - is there some other competing driver for system sounds? For me the solution was to go ASIO exclusively and make sure any other competing drivers weren't in play. And, that system sounds (youtube, spotify) all go through the onboard sound card)