It's stopped recording audio

cinningbao · Post by **cinningbao** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 6:27 pm

Something is seriously wrong here..

I've got a project with 47 audio tracks and I'm trying to record another, so I pressed record, dun-my-thing, had a look at the screen and the audio clip was blank! All the routing is correct, and I could even see the signal in the track level meter before recording it..

So I restarted, tried again, and this is even stranger.. of the minute or so I recorded, the the last 30 seconds of the clip's visual data is kind of greyed-out. When I click on this clip to see it in detail and click in the lower half to hear it, the clip plays back clearly out of sync with the arrange window. see this image:

you can see that the cursor in the clip window is in the last third of the clip, while the arrange windowshow the cursor to be in the first half of the clip.

Why is Live behaving like this?

Live7.0.1 on asus laptop 2.4 coreduo xpprosp2
2 gb RAM, firewire to 828mk2

This has really put a stop to this project, which is a pain.

Any help is much appreciated,
CB

laird · Post by **laird** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 6:40 pm

Try turning of warp.

It looks to me like what Live is displaying in the clip window does not match what live is diplaying in the tracks window nor what Live says numerically.

Numerically, Live says the clip is either 34 or 35 bears long.

but the clip window makes it look like Live has warped that 35-bar long clip to fit a 17-bar size.

And up in the tracks window, it looks like Live tried to make the clip 17 bars long, but got stuck somewhere along the way.... and instead of squeezing 35 bars of audio into 17 bars of length, it just greeyed out the last 18 bars.

Looks to me like you got some sorta weird bug going on, but the fact that it seems to center around whether or not Live Warp's that file you just recorded into a 17-bar long clip makes me suspect that perhaps the bug is happening when Live tried to warp this clip... and hopefully will go away if you turn Warp off.

Still, the Sample start/end and Sample loop start/end Data do not match the loop brace markers in the clip window.

laird · Post by **laird** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 6:43 pm

PS, I don't see the "first half of clip shown above, second half down in clip window" like you suggest.

What I see is that both the whole clip shown above (the dark + greyed out halves) have three regions of silence.

And the soundfile drawing in the clip window below has three regions of silence.

Which makes me think we see the whole clip in both windows, but the warp markers are all screwed up.

Or maybe my eyes are screwed up.

cinningbao · Post by **cinningbao** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:15 pm

I hadn't performed any stretching on the file - this was just 'record - stop'..
I also changed the the auto-warp function in the setting to 'RePitch' to remive any possible artifacts.

I should also mention that when I saved and restarted with this half-written file Live failed to read it complaining that it was an invalid wav file, so something's clearly going wrong with the record process.

More information:

So I started again, tried recording, stopped, looked at the half black/half grey arrange clip, deleted it, and tried to record again. Only this time absolutely NOTHING was recorded, even though I could see it coming on the channel level meter.

Very strange, and it doesn't really help..

laird · Post by **laird** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 9:01 pm

I would have tried turning warp OFF, not switching warp modes.
From the look of the screenshot, it looks like Warp mode is indeed on, even if you didn't try to stretch anything.

Still, yeah, your computer seems to be having troubles writing files.
how much HD space do you have left?

cinningbao · Post by **cinningbao** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 9:54 pm

got about 5GB left - should it really matter? that's what memory's for - buffering the data..

...

well, I loaded the project again, did small recoding test and it seems ok at the moment.

I'm really not sure warping's got anything to do with this - I changed no warp characteristic and it's working again, so I guess it was something else..

however, if it happens again i'll see if turning it off makes the rest of the invalid file readable.

cheers

laird · Post by **laird** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:30 pm

5 gB out of how many?
according to:
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... free+space
that may be too little.

you can try loading some of those clips to RAM and see if that helps.
(hit the RAM button)
you _are_ trying to play back a lot of tracks at the same time, it seems.

Every clip you play back is being read off the HD, and if your HD is slow (like, say, a laptop) then you will run into problems... I'd expect audio to stutter before you lost the ability to record, but thats based on my experience with one desktop PC, not your computer.

Not having a lot of free HD space means more time is spent searching for free space to record. This looks like WIndows... how fragmented is the HD? That can affect performance, too.

cinningbao · Post by **cinningbao** » Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:31 pm

I had 13 GB of 40 on my system drive, not 5 thankfully, which shouldn't affect performance that much.

ALL of the clips were already loaded into ram. 46 audio tracks? is it that much? something which just occured to me is that I think all those tracks were recorded at 24bit, which would increase cpu loads and drive read speed.

well, if Live uses the system drive to buffer record audio data to then that may be a reasonable explanation, but does it?

I defragged the system drive.. and I'm going to try to record this bassline again.

thanks for your help

laird · Post by **laird** » Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:30 pm

I don't think the HD is used as a buffer... but aside from all the clips loaded into RAM, if you ask Live to play back 46 tracks at once, it has to read from 46 different locations on the HD "at once", and these locations aren't usually contiguous.... which is why slower spinning HDs, like the ones in laptops, often have lower perfomance ability than desktops with fast HDs.

Still, what you describe doesn't sound like a simple HD overload issue, it sounds like a bug/error... but that bug/error could be symptomatic of taxing the HD.

Keeping a good amount of free HD space, and keeping your HD defragmented, are just good ways to keep your performance optimal.

I don't think it'll solve your problem...

The next thing I'd try is the opposite of what I just said last time (hi everbody, I'm doctor Nick. You've suffering from Recordinitis, which means you dont have enough RAM. Or too much RAM. I forget. The important thing is, you dont have the right amount!)

All of the clips are loaded into RAM? Now try unloading some of them from RAM... if its not a HD issue causing your recording error, move on to RAM. Free some up, see if you can record.

What's weird is that Live seems to be able to analyze the signal and draw it, but not actually write it to disk. That's weird to me.