Piplodocus wrote:
What type of dropouts, how long, how hard are you pushing it on the % indicator? Do you get ableton disk lights with them? How long is your buffer size.
The dropouts I get are pretty random, usually quick total drop of audio lasting a half second at most.
Ableton's CPU % spikes up of course when this happens, as well as the disk indicator.
The dropouts normally only happen during recording, not so often during playback, but there's a few other things to consider here.
My current MBP is 2.8ghz core 2duo, 4gb ram, 500gb Momentus XT. Everything is running off the XT, I rarely need to use any external drives for recording.
I normally record at either 44.1khz or 48khz 24-bit through either my Apogee Duet or GIO.
The buffer size normally stays at 64 samples regardless of which interface I'm using, and I bump it up to 128 or 256 samples once the session gets heavy on CPU as I'm adding more tracks and/or plugins.
The dropouts mostly occur during recording or when using Looper at 64 samples. I rarely get dropouts if I'm at 128 or 256.
I always use "collect and save" and sync my current Live projects I'm working on in my dropbox.
This means Dropbox is always syncing when I save, record new audio, or consolidate.
It could be the extra push on the drive and CPU when the new audio is syncing through dropbox that causes these occasional glitches, I'm going to pay more attention to see if Dropbox is currently syncing whenever I have a dropout.
Also of note, this happens whether I'm connected to the internet wirelessly or through ethernet, so I don't believe it's airport causing the issue.
Piplodocus wrote:
I figure I shouldn't get ANY apart from very very rare circumstances. How do pro's perform live every night in front of thousands of people, cuz they don't have noticeable dropouts/glitches (the vast majority of the time) and I've been in enough audiences, going back a good few years where hardware wasn't as fast either?
Ideally, of course you shouldn't get any dropouts at all. Maybe version 9 will eliminate the dropouts, it sure would be nice.
As far as Pro's go, they get issues too, but they either take the time to find the best configuration for their performances or they have a tech who handles it for them.
I'm sure lots of people are switching to using SSD's for live performance to avoid audio dropout issues, especially ones caused from vibration from big assed subs.
