Live 5.0.3 Still Causing CPU Spikes!!!

meantown · Post by **meantown** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 6:31 pm

I've been using 5.02 haven't noticed any major problems. Initially I had a lot of problems getting it to work until I uprgraded to OSX Tiger 10.4.2. I did a complete reinstall from scratch as I had just purchased a RME Fireface800.

As I recently checked the list of things that had been fixed in Live 5.03 I thought I should do the update.

Something has gone wrong here. So if you need one more person to step forward to verify there is a problem. Anyway, I’m one of them now.

A session I just recorded using 5.03 was 8.2 Gbytes with 11 tracks. Using a total of 6 Scenes. As it initially seemed okay I used it to track my bands session. I had made a template and when the recording session started it was unresponsive to my midi trigger commands to increment scenes and record. I couldn’t stop the session so I’d just trigger the scenes from the computer keyboard. They seem to be recorded okay but on playback I’m finding that I am having problems in playback of any amount of tracks simultaneously. I'm using no plugs or Virtual instruments in these sessions. Any action such as to hit stop with the space bar starts the ball spinning and non responsiveness like it’s out of ram and with the disk fragmentation D lighting nearly all the time. Going from 20% Cpu to 80% then erratically into the hundreds. Also very slow graphical response.

I can stop it and play individual clips they seem to be recorded as far as they individually will play back but more then 6 clips in a Scene that has 11 clips (number of tracks I was recording in the session at once) and it will glitch an make this alien feedback sort of sound. Normally I record up to 18 tracks simultaneously without problems and usually I can get a total of around 34 tracks.

Here is the list of things I tried to see if I could get proper playback.

Copying the song and sound files to another fresh drive this was on the internal AT buss (not Firewire). In my computer I have 3 Internal ATA Western Digital 120 Gbyte 7200 RPM drives. One the system drive and there’s one I lable AA and another labled BB.
Anyway copying the song and soundfiles over to BB yielded no difference same spiking CPU problem, etc.

A song recorded in 5.02 still plays back fine in 5.02

A song recorded in 5.02 and playback in 5.03 yields the same spiking CPU, etc. problems, etc.

The session I recorded in 5.03 playback in 5.02 yields the spiking CPU, etc. problems.

Dragging individual sound files from the 5.03 session into a new 5.02 session yields the spiking CPU, etc. problems.

Initially the hard disk AA that I recorded the 5.03 band session on was pretty full. The session ending with about 70% of the drive having been used including the previous sessions. I backed up and reinitialized the BB drive just to test if that was a factor. As even BB with no other files on it but a copy of the 5.03 session makes no difference in having the problems; I think the drive and fragmentation has been ruled out.

So I’m following this thread and hoping for some kind of update for 5.03.
I’m also hoping I can salvage these tracks as we played particularly well and I don’t want to have to tell the band I botched those tracks.

As dragging the individual sound files into an empty 5.02 session doesn’t seem to work. I’m kind of confused as to why that would be? I can audition each track as a clip and they seem to sound fine.

Apple Mac G4 1.4G OWC mercury Elite Upgrade (was originally G4 400 AGP). 1.25G Ram. Radeon ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (Mac Edition). OSX Tiger 10.4.2, RME Fireface 800. Propellerheads Reason 3.02, Native Instruments Guitar Rig, Waves NPP 5.0

gomi · Post by **gomi** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 12:16 am

gomi wrote:
leandro wrote: i don't experience these at all on my powerbook.

i spoke to soon.
the curse has stuck me
all my sets do this now.

even ones that are straigh loops with no vst/vsti/fx

gomi · Post by **gomi** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 12:19 am

gomi wrote:
gomi wrote:
leandro wrote: i don't experience these at all on my powerbook.

Deleting all the asd files and letting live rebuild them seems to have solved
this problem for now

EcHo2K · Post by **EcHo2K** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 2:50 pm

Nice, i didn't have any problem with live 4, then started using 5.0.1 (with a crack i admint, i had no money to buy the upgrade at the time) and i had no problems at all, the i decided to make myself a present this xmas and bought the upgrade from 4.x, now with live 5.0.3 i have the same pops and spikes and everything, i think i will go back to the cracked version since it worked well for me

anyway i'm on a iBook G4 933 with 384MB ram, i use the internal audio, i monitored the cpu usage of varius processes during live use, i don't see any spike using top (but live's meter reports them) but instead i see a lot of activity from windowserver something around 20% of cpu time (something that doesn't happen with other programs), i also tried to renice Live to -20 to see if it helps, but things stayed the same, so i think it'something internal to Live, and has nothing to do with drivers (at least for my problem)

primo · Post by **primo** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:18 pm

All sounds familiar.

I installed live 5.0.3 this week, opened a project started in 5.0.1 and it crashed, would not play, audio dropouts, disk read errors etc.

So I re-opened the project in 5.0.1 and the same happened. I had to revert to a backup copy to salvage the project

Post by **Alex** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:56 pm

Hi primo,

I installed live 5.0.3 this week, opened a project started in 5.0.1 and it crashed, would not play, audio dropouts, disk read errors etc.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean. if you open a Live set in Live 5.0.3 and it crashed how could it then "not play" and makes audio drop-outs?

And now you have a Live set created in Live 5.0.1 that crashes Live 5.0.3 and Live 5.0.1 when opening this Live set?
On which computer platform and operating system do you use Live?

regards,
/Alex

EcHo2K · Post by **EcHo2K** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 8:32 pm

i don't know if it can help, but i found that my problems were happening averytime live needed to launche a new clip, especially if it was a midi clip, so after thinking a little i've turned of "latency compensation" in the options menu, my cpu meter decreased by about 10% and the problem is nearly vanished (now i have playback issues only when the meter goes over 70% that i think it's ok, never seen any app work well with that load).

I don't know if the cause is the new latency compensation system or simply decreasing the cpu usage avoided the problem but any way that's my solution

of course you cannot use if you have plugs that has a large latency like the linMB from waves for example.

matics · Post by **matics** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 12:13 pm

I have a powerbook G4 (1.33 GHz) and 1.25 gig ram
Ive been working along on tunes, but as soon as I get using about 8+ channels I start to get crazy CPU eaten and experience that evil digital glitch. It happens even sooner the more effects I use on each channel. to cut down CPU I would just record the clip with the effect and then import it back in as an audio file and it seemed to help

My problem is that I cant ALWAYS do that! I need to have room to play with envelopes etc and I dont have enough CPU to finish any tracks!

Do you guys think this is a computer problem or a Live problem??

forgie · Post by **forgie** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 5:15 pm

matics wrote:to cut down CPU I would just record the clip with the effect and then import it back in as an audio file and it seemed to help

You can achieve the same thing 'in place' by using 'Freeze' (in the edit menu from memory). That's the whole point of Freeze.

gomi · Post by **gomi** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 8:04 pm

forgie wrote:
matics wrote:to cut down CPU I would just record the clip with the effect and then import it back in as an audio file and it seemed to help
You can achieve the same thing 'in place' by using 'Freeze' (in the edit menu from memory). That's the whole point of Freeze.

but if you have an effect on the track that you like to tweak in realtime
it is better to resample the sounds into audio clip and then run them through
that one effect... like a filter or whatever .

if you freeze the whole track you can't control effect parameters.

forgie · Post by **forgie** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 3:30 am

gomi wrote:
forgie wrote:That's the whole point of Freeze.
if you freeze the whole track you can't control effect parameters.

Sorry mate, I missed what the guy was trying to say. Yes, freeze really should be applicable at any 'audio junction' (on the meters between plug-ins), but as of now it's not. Hopefully this'll be in 5.1 (or 5.5 or something). Alternatively, you could set up another track for effects, and route the raw (or frozen synth) audio into the effect track, couldn't you? It's a bit of a PITA, but doable nonetheless.

Sorry, I'm taking this OT. Bowing out of this mini-thread now.

On the OT, everyone needs to post any info on any slight hunches they have for what's causing these problems... I've had none myself, but those who have need to give feedback. It may seem like it sucks, but it's the only way to get this program working for you guys again.

Maybe someone should start a new thread where people post their EXACT hardware and software setup, including driver versions etc. as well as ANY info on exactly what setting do and don't cause problems etc. Commentary would be kept strictly out of this thread to keep it clean.

Software development is a difficult art.... and as much as the Abletons have built, and then seemingly destroyed, so many peoples electronic music making dreams, they are still the only people who can help you get things going again. If all the people who have spent large quantities of time writing very long 'hate posts' could spend that time beta testing or trying to add more information to the discussions maybe we'd be one step closer to fixing things.

Maybe Ableton should set up a bugzilla database, just like many open-source projects out there. I don't see what the downsides could be, except for admitting that commercial software enterprises are not fundamentally superior to open-source ones. Just something for the abes to ponder. It would be a show of good faith to their customer base to say that yes, they do want to make Live perfect.

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Sun Jan 15, 2006 6:37 am

i've had some improvements by downloading the latest drivers from maudio;s website. still some older, very simple, sets pop and click at first...but they eventually stop(probably some RAM antics...still strikes me as unusual tho). and i havent noticed any problems now with new sets.

happy days!

meantown · Post by **meantown** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 5:27 am

Okay. I kind of put this away for a week out of frustration waiting for a bug fix, a new update or something. I was needing to stay focused on my music material for the band so I don’t get a full scale mutiny going on. Anyway I've extentsively tested, checked and tried a lot of things. All this is done not using any fx’s at all. Here are the things I've found.

I don’t seem to have a recording problem only a playback problem.

Conditions.

CPU Meter peaks. Yes big time. Disk fragmentation really seems to show up after the CPU Meters starting peaking (freaking) out. It usually starts slow with a normal cpu reading like 19% (normal) then about 3 or 4 seconds later the big CPU spikes start each getting successively higher. I’ve seen CPU 300+ before. But once it hits 100 it’s sounding like conplete alien stutter crap, etc. Totally unresponsive controls while the Ball spins.

For the life of me I can’t understand how one version has corrupted another. It certainly seems to have.

Live 5.02 song files before I downloaded and used 5.03. work fine. I can go back to sessions before 5.03 that were recorded and even if they have large track counts play back fine in 5.02.

Since having downloaded and using 5.03. Having stopped using 5.03 and using 5.02 playback is screwed up in post 5.02. I’ve double checked this now.

HERE’S SOMETHING IMPORTANT maybe???

Since after using 5.03 when looking in the lives file browsers. Everything that had been recorded to live previously with 5.02 there is a separate folder for the sounds and then an icon for the song (the .als file). The .als song icon also has a folder open button. There are no sounds stored in that folder. The sounds were always in the seperate sound folder of the same song title.
Now I’m seeing a DUPLICATION; the exact same sounds in both the seperate sound folder and the folder under the song title (the .als file). Examining everything done previously to downloading and using 5.03 doesn’t seem to have done this duplication. Now this DUPLICATION is occuring even now when I’ve been creating songs only using 5.02.

Other Things.

My system doesn’t crash it just slows down and show CPU useage of depending on the numbers of tracks. So no crash log. I can’t get more then 6 tracks on playback, after having dragged the sound files into a new song. The cpu goes up greatly with addition of it each track when in playback.

It only seems to be effecting playback. I’ve recorded up to 20 tracks at once in a test. All of my seperate analog inputs simultaneoulsly for 1 hour. Same results. Audio files okay only bad playback.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT. I made a new song in 5.02. I added tracks and audio files from the Apple finder. I grab mp3’s from my Itunes folder. I was able to create about 46 tracks and play them back. If I self contained the song files it used less CPU (makes sense). The cpu memory use was reaching 80+%. Audio starting cutting out. So I deleted tracks back down to somewhere in the number of 35 tracks and there wasn’t any audio drop outs.
Also the meters and audio of the tracks wouldn’t work until the graphical preview of a given track had been made. This would occur the closer it got to the maximum number of tracks. Also sometimes there would be a graphical preview for the track but greyed and it would recalculate a new graphic preview over it and then the track meter would work.

Considering the size and power of my system this seems somewhat correct. Not winning no awards. Still considering my system seems within normal.

Overall Computer system seens to be running everything nicely other then this problem with Live playback. Having a lot of programs in use seems to make no difference. As playing back the 6 tracks that can be played back in Live 5.02. I can also have Itunes, the Internet, Appleworks, and print to my printer. Seems to have plenty of overhead though a little more slowly in responsiveness. Of course normally I have been working on the Live problem with all other programs closed except for the Total Mix & Fireface utility programs that automatically load on Start Up.

I definitely feel it’s isolated to Live.

I’ve done the usual trashed the prefrence files and repaired disk permissions. Using 2 different hard drives for audio record/playback. One freshly repartitioned using one big partition. The other 70% full. No difference.
I’ve also downloaded the most recent driver for the fireface 800 coreaudio driver 2.40 (previously using 2.30). No difference in the problem of my audio playback as far as I can tell.

I guess I’m going to download 4.x. I deleted it and all earlier versions as unnecessary. I've been using Live since 3.x.

Simple playback and record and minor edits for tracks and render to disk to a CD is all I really require right now.

I was thinking about reloading 5.x from my 5.0 disk. I’m hoping I got this straight at the download site. If I delete one authorization then I’m able have one of my 2 authorizations back.

Still there’s no downloading 5.02 is there? I sure don’t want to download 5.03 again. Unless it was possibly corrupted somehow????

Actually I should delete 5.03 from my OSX drive to see if that for some strange reason it makes 5.02 work okay again.

I don’t really know what I should do?

Does anybody got any good advice?

Alex?

Sorry to be complaining here, I’ve read all the other posts and I was expecting a fix here like apparently a lot of people, I sure hope this is informative. I haven’t emailed a tech directly, maybe I should have. The last time it seemed like I ran in circles. Until I cleaned my system and was in the process of switching hardware and gone to OSX 10.42 Tiger so a lot of things happened and it worked fine. UNTIL??!! 5.03
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Apple Mac G4 1.4G OWC mercury Elite Upgrade (was originally G4 400 AGP). 1.25G Ram. Radeon ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (Mac Edition). OSX Tiger 10.4.2, RME Fireface 800. Propellerheads Reason 3.02, Native Instruments Guitar Rig, Waves NPP 5.0

meantown · Post by **meantown** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 5:57 am

Here's something else I just thought of. Kind of strange. I didn't think it was possible to have more then one song file of live open at a time. One time I found that I had 5.03 song open and 5.02 song open and another song which was an empty Live song probably the new song default. Anyway obviously they all ran like crap. I didn't notice they were all open until. I had to quit one then I seen there was another different song open; quit it and then finally the empty live song and quit it. I didn't think that was possible???

meantown · Post by **meantown** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:14 am

Another thing about the default program version of Live to open a live song. I can't seem to get to be changed to 5.02. Every time I change it still defaults to 5.03 trying to open it. So now I've drug the 5.02 program to the side bar in OSX and just always open 5.02 from there. It seems to me I didn't use to have a problem changing what the default Live program version for a song file would open.