HELP!! Ableton in the theatre - audio dropouts!!!

[Meeko]

Allo all,

I'm running Live 4 off my Powerbook 1.5 (512ram) through my Digi002 Rack (thus through the Digi CoreAudio Driver). All audio is being streamed from a Lacie 7200rpm FW drive. Essentially we're using Live as a big FX unit, to sync all playing singing to tempo for delays, and triggering loops, textures and one-hits of dialogue. I'm running a few FX, reverbs, compressors etc - but my CPU never goes above 35%...

We hit trouble when triggering audio - a clip will play for 2-3 seconds, dropout for about 5, and then come back in, like that 5 seconds of audio had been muted. It probably happens one in every 8-10 times, during bits of music this has been ok and covered up by our playing, but in the show last night it happened when the two central pieces of dialogue are played with no accompaniment.

Is it RAM? CPU? The fact I'm running off an external drive? The 002's driver? Blargh!! Any advice much appreciated.

[DeadlyKungFu]

More RAM is the most likely suspect.

There are some web sites with optimisation tips for computers, you could check one out to get more out of your lappie.

[mercyplease]

Not good for live theatre so you need to get a solution pronto. Im not to knowledgeable on this type of stuff probably because I rarely experience these drop out problems unless im working on a heavy track and vst count.

Ive never had much success with external firewire or usb drives because of the same probs yo have, so from where im standing it sounds to me like your external drive transfer speed might be the problem? but then again this could be my lack of experience in setting up external drives for audio recording. I used scsi before whcih worked great but like I say havent had much success with firewire or usb especially on a laptop.

Im sure your experienced enough considering your doing live theatre gigs to make sure your buffer settings are good for playback so other than the external drive thing I dont really know.

Have you tried playback from the internal drive? you can seemingly buy a drive that will run at 7200 for your laptop now so that might be worth checking out. You should have at least 1g of ram.

[mercyplease]

It probably happens one in every 8-10 times

Wait, I got this sometimes for no reason I was able to suss out. It was quite rare so was never been able to pinpoint the cause. The only thing that restored harmony was powering off and restarting but this is something you cant do obviously

it always felt to me that Live forgot to release ram or forgot there was a hard drive to use as a swap thingy but I havent had the problem for a while which may be due to one of the updates.

Do you have the latest update?

[jasefos]

Allo all,

I'm running Live 4 off my Powerbook 1.5 (512ram) through my Digi002 Rack (thus through the Digi CoreAudio Driver). All audio is being streamed from a Lacie 7200rpm FW drive. Essentially we're using Live as a big FX unit, to sync all playing singing to tempo for delays, and triggering loops, textures and one-hits of dialogue. I'm running a few FX, reverbs, compressors etc - but my CPU never goes above 35%...

We hit trouble when triggering audio - a clip will play for 2-3 seconds, dropout for about 5, and then come back in, like that 5 seconds of audio had been muted. It probably happens one in every 8-10 times, during bits of music this has been ok and covered up by our playing, but in the show last night it happened when the two central pieces of dialogue are played with no accompaniment.

Is it RAM? CPU? The fact I'm running off an external drive? The 002's driver? Blargh!! Any advice much appreciated.

Ensure you have the latest Core audio drivers installed for the 002 for a start. Digidesign's token "Core Audio driver for use with software other then their own" has been somewhat of a work in progress ... remember ProTools doesn't communicate with digidesign hardware via Core Audio.

Also ensure you have altered MacOSX's Energy Saving settings to provide maximum CPU performance and for it to never sleep.

Definitely 1Gb of RAM is recommended.

Also if you are want reliable performance when firing off clips in session view use the Clip property which forces Live to load an entire clip's audio file into RAM upon opening the project. You can do this on a per-clip basis (check the manual for more information). Remember that Live's disk caching system cannot predict the future so to speak (i.e. the caching system does not know when you're about to launch a clip). Try activiting the RAM option for the clips which you are experiencing drop outs.

Hope this helps ...

Cheers

[mercyplease]

Allo all,

I'm running Live 4 off my Powerbook 1.5 (512ram) through my Digi002 Rack (thus through the Digi CoreAudio Driver). All audio is being streamed from a Lacie 7200rpm FW drive. Essentially we're using Live as a big FX unit, to sync all playing singing to tempo for delays, and triggering loops, textures and one-hits of dialogue. I'm running a few FX, reverbs, compressors etc - but my CPU never goes above 35%...

We hit trouble when triggering audio - a clip will play for 2-3 seconds, dropout for about 5, and then come back in, like that 5 seconds of audio had been muted. It probably happens one in every 8-10 times, during bits of music this has been ok and covered up by our playing, but in the show last night it happened when the two central pieces of dialogue are played with no accompaniment.

Is it RAM? CPU? The fact I'm running off an external drive? The 002's driver? Blargh!! Any advice much appreciated.

Ensure you have the latest Core audio drivers installed for the 002 for a start. Digidesign's token "Core Audio driver for use with software other then their own" has been somewhat of a work in progress ... remember ProTools doesn't communicate with digidesign hardware via Core Audio.

Also ensure you have altered MacOSX's Energy Saving settings to provide maximum CPU performance and for it to never sleep.

Definitely 1Gb of RAM is recommended.

Also if you are want reliable performance when firing off clips in session view use the Clip property which forces Live to load an entire clip's audio file into RAM upon opening the project. You can do this on a per-clip basis (check the manual for more information). Remember that Live's disk caching system cannot predict the future so to speak (i.e. the caching system does not know when you're about to launch a clip). Try activiting the RAM option for the clips which you are experiencing drop outs.

Hope this helps ...

Cheers

So you dont think the external hard drive is a possibility? and what if he has long clips for background audio (traffic etc) would it be adviseable to load all of the audio in to ram?

[mouthster]

I really think you need more RAM. 512 is what I would consider the bare minimum for general computer use in OS X. Double that for music production duties.

[jasefos]

I really think you need more RAM. 512 is what I would consider the bare minimum for general computer use in OS X. Double that for music production duties.

Absolutely .....

512Mb is the bare bones minimum.
1Gb comfortable however you could always do with more.

[mercyplease]

Have you added the extra ram? I would like to know what your solution was

[forgie]

I would also check that you don't have any widgets on your dashboard that are using up system resources. Make sure you close all other programs while using Live since you only have 512MB RAM. Do you have any utilities installed on your computer that do things in the background? These can cause issues with any 'real time' production.

[Meeko]

Many, many thanks for your speedy advice gents (I assume )

In the end the problem was solved by freeing up as much RAM as possible (I freed a hell of a lot disabling Dashboard - http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... &lsrc=osxh), and increasing my latency up to 5ms. All appeared to be fine... then a friend offered to lend me her G5 (her email and wordprocessing workhorse, hehe) which took everything I threw at it plus more. It's a pretty big show, in the end I decided not to run with my rig and risk looking unprofessional. Thanks all for your time and ideas

[forgie]

Ahh yes I forgot to mention latency..... that's always something to check if you're getting stutters and glitches. Running at less then 5ms latency requires a well tuned system, good hardware and just maybe a little bit of luck from the gods!


Good luck with your show! What sort of music is it exactly?

[sweetjesus]

i too have run into this problem, but on a PC.

it mainly occured when the main hard drive was getting full and both RAM and virtual memory were limited.

[Johnisfaster]

I didn't understand how to disable dashboard. the link given gives this info...

Make Dashboard go away

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Make Dashboard come back

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock to have this take effect

what do I do with such information? defaults write com.app ? ?

I'm assuming something with my preferences but I just don't get it yet

[Johnisfaster]

nevermind I did a little googling and realised you're supposed to go into terminal to make the changes. already I can see a big difference in the speed of even the simplest tasks. crazy.

thanks for this tip.