live 6: dropouts with 10% cpu using dual core????

tylast · Post by **tylast** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:58 pm

I've been running the Intel Quad core with no issues, then one day I went into the bios of my motherboard & enable the Intel Step Speed power Saving feature....whoa! Drop outs like crazy! So, I disabled it & all is good again. Try that!

Too bad there's not a way for Live to disable that feature when it's on & restore it when I close Live.

michal holy · Post by **michal holy** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 9:19 pm

dizzib wrote:
I use the pci latency tool (google it) to give the soundcard max priority, and I also use prio.exe (again google it) to set live process priority to high or realtime. Touch wood this is fixed now since it was driving me nuts!!

Andy.

For all PCI card users on Windows XP (like the old RME cardbus solution for laptops), "PCI latency tool" is what you need.
A pci latency value of 64 for all audio services, and a value of 248 for everything else like network cards and graphics etc. seems to work fine for me right now.... hope it's going to stay that way. Thanks, Andy!

latufe · Post by **latufe** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 9:02 am

funny, i posted theoriginal massege quiet a long time ago and didnt noticed the replies... it turnd out that this bloody laptop has a very old nasty problem, everytime the fan goes on, the audio goes down... i was lucky enough to rplace it and to get a macbook instead, (which im quiet happy with, regardless of the fact that i had to change the multiface with echo audiofire...)

anyways,.

put the toshiba a100 serie on your black lists as a not daw compatible laptop....

cheers,

L.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:28 am

tylast wrote:I've been running the Intel Quad core with no issues, then one day I went into the bios of my motherboard & enable the Intel Step Speed power Saving feature....whoa! Drop outs like crazy! So, I disabled it & all is good again. Try that!

Too bad there's not a way for Live to disable that feature when it's on & restore it when I close Live.

doesnt speedswitch do the same thing?

capo-wear-i · Post by **capo-wear-i** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:44 am

michal holy wrote:
dizzib wrote:
I use the pci latency tool (google it) to give the soundcard max priority, and I also use prio.exe (again google it) to set live process priority to high or realtime. Touch wood this is fixed now since it was driving me nuts!!

Andy.
For all PCI card users on Windows XP (like the old RME cardbus solution for laptops), "PCI latency tool" is what you need.
A pci latency value of 64 for all audio services, and a value of 248 for everything else like network cards and graphics etc. seems to work fine for me right now.... hope it's going to stay that way. Thanks, Andy!

Eh ?

I thaught that the Values used in the PCI Latency Tool were priority values -
Ie Big values (248) : High priority. Low Values (64) : Low priority

That's why things like a NVidia Graphics chip will come with a preset value of say 248 (High) and a disk controller will come a default value of 32 (Low).

Having said all this, everyone's system is different - and I've no doubt that those settings that you mentioned work for you. Any reason to choose those values ? Any better the other way round ?

This is how I've set up mine :

Indigo Soundcard should be high (248 priority )
Video Cards should be low (64 prority or less)

Everything else stays put.

tylast · Post by **tylast** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 11:46 pm

Update:

Well, come to find out...my motherboard had TWO power saving features. I disabled the C1 stepping, but I don't think all boards do that. So, if you have issues, check this link.

Here's where I found it.. I only found 1 thread on all of ableton's forums that mentioned that MS link. There should be a sticky in the forums with common solutions to apparent common problems.

warabunga · Post by **warabunga** » Fri May 18, 2007 9:40 am

I am on a macbook pro 2.33 15".
getting glitches almost everytime I play a sample for the first time... this is for audio tracks and midi tracks. well, after having hit all the samples for ones it playes rather fine...

one interesting thing I've discovered that in "Aktivitäts Anzeige" it marks live with over 120% CPU usage wherelse live only shows about 40%... how is this possible?
here's a picture:

anyone, what could I possibly do to stop these glitches?

mdb · Post by **mdb** » Fri May 18, 2007 6:38 pm

Mike Goodwin wrote:I am getting this same problem, big dropouts when running at -%cpu. I am running a bran new intel core Duo on a swanky asus motherboard. The soundcard is a bran new firestudio and works fine otherwise. I can run reaktor in stand alone mode and all is fine but big dropouts in live. Not cool. Anyone have any info on this?

Pretty much the same specs as you, But I'm running a AMD dual Core and i have the SAME EXACT problem just playing back 22 tracks of 88k/24bit audio without plugins. Funny thing is, i can play the same exact set in Live 5.2.2 without a hitch. Same files, Same settings, Same everything.. Except that Live 6 Glitches out and all audio stops and the hard disc light is solid orange until i hit stop.

Another weird thing i noticed.. When you start the song from the beginning, Live isn't even reading the disc. It just sits there until it gets to a a certain point in the song and then it starts reading the drive frantically.. Now, I'm no programmer.. but shouldn't live be reading the disc and gathering the file info even before its ready to play it back as a pre buffer so this sort of stuff doesn't happen? I don't know though.. Maybe that has nothing to do with it.. It just appeared to have something to do with the drive by the looks of the activity light.

Who knows, just chiming in to solidify that there is a problem with Live 6.

dizzib · Post by **dizzib** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 7:33 pm

For months I've been going crazy over this issue and fingers crossed I've finally cracked it, at least on my PC!

Symptoms were that every minute or so my RME Digi96 would freeze for a split second and Live's CPU usage would spike to some rediculous value e.g. 2000%. So I was forced to use my crappy Realtek '97.

It turns out that earlier revisions of the PCI Latency Tool can detect more hardware than the latest v3.* verions. So when I installed v2.3 of this tool my ATI Radeon 9200SE graphics card suddenly appeared in the list showing a latency of 255 i.e. it was taking processor time away from my RME Digi96! Googling around I discovered that ATI cards forcibly set their latency to 255 and it requires changing the registry setting of DisableProgPCILatency from 0 to 1 to fix this. There were about 15 or so entries, and after I changed all of them and rebooted, the PCI Latency Tool showed the latency to be 32 (the BIOS default setting). For some reason my RME card has never shown up in the PCI Latency tool, so I reset all the other latencies to 32 across the board.

Now at last my RME has room to breathe and I've now been running live for the last few hours without a glitch! Hopefully this will help someone out there.

Andy.

jimbodeluxe · Post by **jimbodeluxe** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 7:12 pm

I have intermittant audio drop outs the first time I launch some clips, and it can be either audio or midi, especially midi with Impulse. Also, if I enable a midi track to play a plug in from a M-Audio O2, the first note I play causes an audio drop out.

I have a new MacBook Pro, with the 7200 rpm internal HD and all my audio clips come form an exteranl firewire 800 HD. Using internal sound, no audio interface.

I've tried increasing buffer/latency to 1700 samples/45ms latency, turning decoding cache on and off, changing size, nothing seems to help and it's a very intermittant problem.

Only happens in the beginning of a set. After a few launches, no more audio drop outs for the rest of an hour long set.

I use Live LIVE, so this is making me crazy. Any helpful advice would be most appreciated

uncovered · Post by **uncovered** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 8:46 pm

I posted another message regarding a similar problem, I just bought Live to use with my Macbook and Motu 828mkII firewire interface, and I get a big dropout/glitches whenever I play a new clip or punch out of recording a clip, then I get intermittent glitches in playback afterwards.

What the hell Ableton?

The only reason I got Live is to use it for looping during live performances.
Im still waiting to get a reply from my email to Ableton support.
I feel like I just wasted my money on this software...

DJ VAKIS · Post by **DJ VAKIS** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:56 pm

Most people here have this problem exept Robert Henke Aka Monolake.Maybe Mr Robert Henke can explain to us what he is doing and don't have this problem.If ....................

Thanks a lot Mr Robert.

jimbodeluxe · Post by **jimbodeluxe** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 11:10 pm

But so many of my friends who use LIVE do not have this problem.

With me, it's only on the first few clips in the set, then Live runs smooth, no problems. It's like the computer has to get used to what's going on, then it is fine with it. It's like the computer has to relearn the pathways initially, then it works.

Could it be because there were older versions of Live on my computer? Do I need to scrub and start over, reloading everything? That would be a major pain.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

dgussin · Post by **dgussin** » Fri Dec 07, 2007 12:33 am

We have had the same problem too with Live 6 - audio dropouts occurred every so often (almost like clock-work) and the audio would resume after about 1 second playing from the same spot as when it dropped out.

We scoured the internet, looking for answers. First we thought it had to do with the Presonus Firebox, so we upgraded the firmware and that didn't fix it.

We then thought it was because of the size of the set: it has about 1.5GB of samples (all audio), and no RAM switches turned on. So we opened some other smaller sets and the same dropouts occurred.

Okay, next step. maybe it is a problem with the operating system! Windows XP pro so we looked for KB articles on the Microsoft website. We thought we found the answer a few times through postings in the Ableton forums (thanks to everyone who suggested patches), and although the patches improved system performance (negligibly), the audio dropouts still occurred.

Then we found the answer: we deleted all of the VSTs from the set we were working on. One of the VST's failed to delete, to the point that it crashed Live (it happened to be the Vanguard Bass VST). We then pointed the VST directory to somewhere else on the hard drive, and uninstalled all VST's from the operating system. We opened the set, played it, and voila, no dropouts! We then resinstalled each VST, one-by-one, opening the set afterwards and re-inserting one at a time to see if it would have any effect.

Our advice to anyone with these similar symptoms is to try rolling back the VSTs and install them one by one to see if any of the VSTs are the culprit. You might just get lucky!

Environment:
Dell Inspiron 9400, 2.2Ghz dual-core, 2GB RAM, Windows XP Pro
Presonus Firebox
Live 6.0.10

WaveRider · Post by **WaveRider** » Fri Dec 07, 2007 3:26 pm

latufe wrote:hy mates!

ive just bought me a new laptop, toshiba sattelite a100, T5500 (2x1.66) 1GBram, 667fsb, nvidia go 7600 (128mb ram), using my old beloved RME multiface... my system is fully audio optimized, no extra services what-so-ever are running, (when i start my machine i have around 830mb of ram free) hard drives are defragmented, no hardware conflicts, everything by the book

im expiriecing dropouts when working with live 6(3ms latency-with multiply proccesor enabeld) even with 10% cpu...(no drive overload is indicated) somthing ive never expirienced befor with my old P4 2.8ghz 1GBram....

anyone has encounterd somthing symilar? does anyone know if somthing has changed with the PCMCIA technology?

it seems to make no sens... evrything is working much faster with this machine, but i get those drop outs, dosent matter if its 10% or 50%....

well,

thanks,

L.

same with me, got dropouts at 15% cpu and at any latency, Ableton knows nothing about the bug and will say it is your system -they are full of sh*t

live 6: dropouts with 10% cpu using dual core????

Re: live 6: dropouts with 10% cpu using dual core????