Ableton Skipping and Creating a Major Delay

[gurubear]

I am a member of a six person professional a cappella group. I use Ableton Live 9 to control input/output during live performance. I connect my Mac Book Pro to a Presonus Studiolive 24:4:2Ai via firewire. I've created one-song scenes which basically reroute mic feeds from their current inputs on the board (1-6) to all other inputs (7-24). I also use plugins and audio effects on many of the channels. At least once per show, Ableton Live suddenly skips and a delay occurs on the entire mix. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating. At times, we have been able to just focus on the click in our ears to keep the song together, but at other times, we've had to drop out completely. The CPU usage doesn't really climb above 20-30%...and most of the time it's around 6-10%. I was hoping someone might be able to help with this problem...

[ChironControl]

My first idea would be to check the operating system for anything which could be responsible for the problem. In this case it's not easy to find the problem because you cannot reproduce it easily.

[gurubear]

I'm running OSX 10.9.5

I've made sure to not upgrade to anything more recent because I made that mistake on my other computer and it resulted in the need to purchase new software.

I'm not aware of any major issues with Ableton and Mavericks. Are there any I should be aware of?

[ChironControl]

Sorry, I am not an expert for Mac.

[madeofoak]

you are not alone. this is a real problem between ableton and newer (post 2013) macbook pros, and one that (thus far) no one i've talked to at ableton has been able to solve or even give me the cause of.

[dewaldo]

I've had a similar issue recently. Running a mac pro on OS X 10.10.4

[Stromkraft]

I'm running OSX 10.9.5

I've made sure to not upgrade to anything more recent because I made that mistake on my other computer and it resulted in the need to purchase new software.

I'm not aware of any major issues with Ableton and Mavericks. Are there any I should be aware of?

Do all this that doesn't affect your group's performance negatively: How to reduce CPU load in Live?

Especially the last "De-activate your Wi-Fi". Wifi has been know to cause CPU spikes. You should also possibly contemplate turning off Intel Speedstep if your CPU allows for this. In OS X you likely need to do this by altering the system. To the best of my knowledge I've had no bad side-effects from doing this on my Core2Duo (unless I run on battery).

[mikestjean]

Anyone have any recent experience or updates on this? I am still having this issue running on Mavericks and basically... wtf. How is this even a thing that happens. The world's leading live-performance software and the world's leading OS running upwards of $4k investment, can't playback reliably. In the music industry that's like selling a car with brakes that sometimes fail.

[yur2die4]

Hard to diagnose each specific problem without knowing the circumstances.

Even a leading car manufacturer's car will have useless brakes if the driver is speeding off the edge of an icy cliff.

[mikestjean]

I agree it is hard to diagnose. I am sure it is more complicated than this, but I would have thought DAWs and other 'important' software could be treated as a high-priority service and be the absolute last thing to 'skip'; and then if it is skipping, this means the whole OS is shitting itself for no good reason.

[yur2die4]

Well, for starters it depends on what plug ins are being used and the audio driver settings. Also the complexity of a set overall.

[mikestjean]

*Bump*

I still have this infrequent but relatively devastating issue, and have heard from others recently that this is still an issue. I don't really hear about it on any other DAWs so despite it seeming like it must be a low-level OS issue, it almost seems like more of an Ableton / Interface .. but who knows?

M

[[jur]]

Have you tried support@ableton.com ?

[pottering]

Is the "D" indicator in the top right (right besides the CPU Load meter) flashing?

Seems most people already know about CPU usage, but I noticed many miss the fact that hard disk speed can also matter. People don't even mention the "D" indicator when asking for help.

Running 20 audio tracks while recording your performance to another audio track, in a hard disk that is nearly full (way too common if you are a producer, all those samples), may end up overloading it.

[mikestjean]

This is in a live-playback scenario

No recording

8 - 16 tracks but never that many files being read at once- even only 6 .wav files max

Little to no vsts- all ableton-native if there are

I really can't imagine it being a disk overload; it's in the middle of a show where we're playing song after song after song, and it's always the same setup- 6 tracks playing... then out of nowhere it just hiccups.