Ableton Forum

Hi,

We do read, and do consider the issues. it is not that easy to come with a statement though as issues are probably different from one another, and we yet have to get the same behaviour on our machines. I am having a duo core PC and I dont get that, and on our Macs we do not get such thing either, yet.

Adding more RAM could solve some issues it is true. Then, on the PC side there are lots of variables such as built-in softwares from manufaturers, anti-virus/spyware softwares, other company softwares that like to modify things deep in the PC, video card driver/control panels etc..

The best thing to do is to give as many details as possible, and try disabling as much as possible, and looking strongly at the power schemes and hardware configuration. Eliminating variables such as controlers and all external equipment is a good idea to to troubleshoot.

Regards,
Amaury

Thanks for your contribution.

Issues are not different, they're the same : people start working on either Mac or PC with Live , then stop for, say, 20 minutes, then come back and the samples start playing with dropouts. The only way to solve the problem being to quit Live and start it again.

Of course we tried disabling anything non essential, change hard disk, no midi at all, no internet, no warping, no plug-ins, no dual processing, change the audio buffer, less samples and so on. The only thing I didn't try is another MOTU Traveler cos' I'm not rich enough… Maybe another Live and another computer ?

Again there seems to be the beginning of a solution through adding RAM. But I have to be prudent and make more tests.

My question is : did you really try waiting for one hour without touching anything then come back and see what happens ? This is the point, the fact that the problem occurs after a certain amount of time.

Hi,

One question: did you try without your MOTU soundcard?

I'll keep investigating that issue, be assureed that it is taken seriously.

Regards,
Amaury

Amaury wrote:We do read, and do consider the issues. it is not that easy to come with a statement though as issues are probably different from one another, and we yet have to get the same behaviour on our machines. I am having a duo core PC and I dont get that, and on our Macs we do not get such thing either, yet.

Hey Amaury, hows things..

re: the long-term performance issues (Live 4, 5, 6 primarily) with

- stuttering
- dropouts
- digital glitching
- locked arrange grid
- long load times (5 - 10 minutes) on large sets
- failure to close out gracefully
- locked up interface opon leaving the app open for a time to sit

These are all chronic problems with a lot of users over a long period of time. We have seen it firsthand on our machines, on our friends, clients, personal and professional on both PC and Mac - on all kinds of configurations.

Im sure you have had people working on these issues for a long time now, and Im sure there are some capable people on it and there is some kind of plan to get to the bottom of it

However. I have heard this basic answer come from Ableton on here for a
long time now. Not only that its hard to troubleshoot because of a variety of configuations.

But that you guys cant reproduce these issues. I find that hard to believe. Its so consistant - that more likely than not, any given machine I run into running Live is going to have one or more of these issues - and i see a lot of people because this is what i do ...

How can you not reproduce them? Do you have access to a variety of machines to test? Its been 3 years.

Adding more RAM could solve some issues it is true. Then, on the PC side there are lots of variables such as built-in softwares from manufaturers, anti-virus/spyware softwares, other company softwares that like to modify things deep in the PC, video card driver/control panels etc..

All of this is understandable. However 1 gig of RAM for a set without multisampled instruments and using smart resource management in the set should be enough to work without major hassles ... the way you can on Cubase or ProTools for instance.

If we cant - Ableton should recognize this officially and make a statement, up the recommended system requirments, and save everyone a lot of grief by being honest and open with the customers imo

But even this will not help the people running Core Duo 2's with 2 gigs of ram that are still having these problems. Or Dual G5s with 4, or even 8 gigs (I have seen it)

And I see people all the time on here, posting specific system configs, with superfast state of the art studios that are having these problems.

Also -- point taken about virus scanners, indexing, 3rd party drivers etc etc

I think its important to note how many of us on this board have not only taken care of the basics, we have gone above and beyond reading this board at times and banging our head against the wall to come up with the answer.

We've covered all of those things. I think its important to give some credit to the people youve seen reporting the same (related) kinds of issues here on the board for a couple of years now .... we know all that.

We have done all that and are trying new things all the time simply so we can continue working and finish our projects

We just dont understand why we are getting the same answer that you cant reproduce these problems in Berlin. How is that possible?

.

By the way ..

Since last year I have swapped out almost every component on my PC but my M-Audio interface and my mouse. And I still have some of these problems.

I think I'll getting rid of the M-Audio first and see what happens


If that doesnt work, I'll try the mouse.

.

just to add

I noticed this most again recently when using a big set full of samplers with EIC instruments loaded - I had the same thing, after a while it got really bad and then got better when I restarted live

there were lots of small samples in the samplers leaving alot of room for these kind of memory leaks

Josh Von wrote:By the way ..

Since last year I have swapped out almost every component on my PC but my M-Audio interface and my mouse. And I still have some of these problems.

I think I'll getting rid of the M-Audio first and see what happens


If that doesnt work, I'll try the mouse.

.

Actually for me, moving where my mouse was plugged in had a huge impact on how Live runs. Seriously!

I personally have nothing really to disable I'm on a brand new mac book pro with nothing added to it, The problem is also apparent for me the first time you load the live set you play the clip and it judders the first time the clip is brought in.

This needs addressing quickly as it's going to make playing live very stressful and not to mention crap sounding. I have gigs coming up next month and can do with out this.

Krisstoff

Defragging seems to have helped my stuttering a lot, as well as loading a bunch of my clips into RAM. The problem isn't 100% gone, but the stuttering is a lot less frequent and less drastic, i.e. I've only heard one small stutter in the last few days.

Anyway, I need to keep playing long sets and keep stressing my machine to see how far I can push it. I wonder if my frequent use of complex warp settings has anything to do with this. I wonder if a faster drive would help. More RAM might help.

Anyway, back to the studio! Good luck people. And quit running virus scans in the middle of your set!
B

bradelectro wrote: I wonder if my frequent use of complex warp settings has anything to do with this.

Definitely, complex mode has a huge impact on performance / resources used.

If you are running lots of complex mode clips simultaneously, you will see a big increase on the green meter and chance of audio dropouts / lockups goes way up

I wonder if a faster drive would help.

Also definite - see my earlier post re: drives - seems its not just RPM speed as a factor but overall thru-put. SATA made a big difference for me.

.

Thanks Josh for your detailed posts. I feel I'm not alone any more having to take theses condescendant answers : sorry, we can't reproduce it ! I don't believe it.

It is so true the Abes can't imagine how much time we spend on our machine disabling every possible software and hardware before we think Live has a problem. What are you thinking guys ? That we just jump on the forum every single little hitch ? No, we blame it on our own gear first.

Amaury wrote:Hi,

One question: did you try without your MOTU soundcard?

I'll keep investigating that issue, be assureed that it is taken seriously.

Regards,
Amaury

OK, my MOTU Traveler… Why not ? But why did this "thing" leave me alone with Live 5 and the same interface ? But OK, I will unplug and see what happens and let you know.

What is important is that you hear what we say about MEMORY. There's a serious chance the problem's lying there.

BTW I love this app, I just need it to work like it did with the new up to date, faster, more reliabe machines and OS we all use now, which I think is a minimum for a pro software.

mocker wrote:Thanks Josh for your detailed posts. I feel I'm not alone any more having to take theses condescendant answers : sorry, we can't reproduce it !

Honestly, I know some posts can appear condescending online but I know for sure in this case it's not that way at all

The interesting thing about this is that:

These same, basic problems of dropuouts, stuttering, long load quit times etc were worse for more people in version 5 than version 6. The forum was filled with posts about it

It looks like the upgrade helped many people, but now some people that were fine are now not with the new version .. odd ..

.

mocker wrote:Thanks Josh for your detailed posts. I feel I'm not alone any more having to take theses condescendant answers : sorry, we can't reproduce it ! I don't believe it.

It is so true the Abes can't imagine how much time we spend on our machine disabling every possible software and hardware before we think Live has a problem. What are you thinking guys ? That we just jump on the forum every single little hitch ? No, we blame it on our own gear first.

Hello Mocker,

There are more than you and Josh on that thread, and the reminders are always needed for people to remember to turn things off etc.. I'm not expecially addressing to you when I say that, good if you think of these things on your own. Sometimes I don't.

Amongst all the people reporting on that thread, I'm pretty sure all don't have the same issue, and certainly don't talk about the same symptoms. That is why I post these reminders.

Last week or the week before, we had a user in the support having these kind of 'drop-outs', and uninstalling an ATI utility from his laptop solved the problem. We did not think of it, he found on his own. It does not mean everybody should get rid of ATI utilities, it means computers all have particularities.

Now there may be a real problem with Live for some users, sure, and let's try to find out what, where and how to isolate these problems.

The more simple the setup and the scenario, the easiest it is to reproduce and solve the problem.

Regards,
Amaury

Thanks a lot for your answer. Sorry if I sounded a bit rogh on you guys. But it seems sometimes you have to raise your tone to get some response. Thus when you can start a real conversation, your troubles seem more acceptable.

What I'll do too is try to boot from a freshly formatted HD with minimum stuff and see what happens… when I have time to do that.

Yet that doesn't explain how the available memory can vanish so fast when using Live watching Activity Monitor.

Keep you posted