Ableton Glitching and tracks corrupting

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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TheCollective
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2020 7:08 pm

Ableton Glitching and tracks corrupting

Post by TheCollective » Mon Jun 22, 2020 7:19 pm

We do live full band recording sessions anywhere from 5 mins to 1 hour on Ableton 10 live suite and it will randomly glitch or crackle for about 3-5 seconds, corrupting that small section of whatever is recording. Sometimes we go an entire hour with no glitching and sometimes it glitches in the first few seconds. I have scoured the internet and can find next to nothing addressing the issue. I have tried disabling any and all effects on each track, freezing tracks, and setting the buffer to 1024 or higher), turning off wifi, turning off all other programs, and it will still randomly glitch, and its definitely a glitch, not a crackle from lowering the buffer size or having faulty cables. We record anywhere from 1 input at a time to 20, and the glitch occurs randomly, sometimes glitching with only one track recording and sometimes glitching with 20 recording, sometimes not glitching at all. Ive tried using three different computers with the same results. If we are recording 1 track and the glitch occurs, then just that 3-5 seconds on that track is corrupted and the others (which have already been recorded) remain fine, if we are recording more tracks and it glitches then it corrupts the 3-5 seconds of those tracks, whatever is being recorded at the time. All this happens when the CPU is at 3%-5%. My Mac is a MacBook Pro running Catalina 3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3. I have submitted help requests to Ableton with recordings and reports with absolutely no response, super disappointed in their customer care. Im desperate for help cause Ive got no more ideas on what to do...??

Joey Baga Donuts
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jan 14, 2021 10:25 pm

Re: Ableton Glitching and tracks corrupting

Post by Joey Baga Donuts » Thu Jan 14, 2021 10:35 pm

Same thing happening to me all of a sudden. Also not a buffer issue. This is something different. Seems to only happen with repeated live takes. I’m a drummer recording my own takes. THIS is a HUGE energy suck as it will start to glitch occasionally while recording. Thankfully if it is going to happen it seems (for now) reserved to somewhere near the beginning of the tune...first 16 bars or so. Ableton has also started running pretty slowly and freezing occasionally. I have it parsed out on several drives and have 229 GB free on my computer. Running Ableton user library and 3rd party plugins from my laptop drive C and I have a back up hard drive, a project hard drive (that hold the temp files and cache) and an extra library hard drive for samples and what not. I have everything configured properly. Not sure what the issue would be. Anyone? Anyone at all?

jestermgee
Posts: 4500
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:38 am

Re: Ableton Glitching and tracks corrupting

Post by jestermgee » Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:37 pm

What I don't note in either post is the brand of audio interface, tho post 1 was last year and is a brick of text so I could have glossed over that detail and missed it.

Often a small sound glitch (or hiccup) will be not the buffer specifically, but an interrupt in the real-time processing. This could be a billion things but for a PC based laptop, one of the first things to check will be the CPU power setting because if that is set to anything other than 100%% full power (since laptops by default are set to power save by dynamically adjusting CPU power) then this will certainly cause issues. You may also have to check BIOS settings. Also, check USB power settings and ensure there is no sleep or power saving options there.

Other things that can cause hiccups would be ANYTHING running so open task manager and kill every process that is not related to what you are recording. Kill all your web browsers, Gforce garbage, dropbox, google drive.... everything that is running. Switch off WIFI and BlueTooth.

mindless.inertia
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Apr 17, 2010 5:15 pm

Re: Ableton Glitching and tracks corrupting

Post by mindless.inertia » Mon Sep 27, 2021 5:19 am

something just like this has been happening in my system for a couple of years. recording, or even just with a live audio input. as noted, very intermittent and absolutely unpredictable. have caught it with multiple interfaces, have caught it with Ableton Live 10 and 11. also as noted, CPU usage low and no other performance issues. seems to happen mostly when there's actual audible signal coming in, almost never during silence.
any more clues or ideas?

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