Ableton Forum

During my first live stage performance last night, I found a disturbing bug.

1. Start up live
2. Load a song (1 audio track, 1 midi track with a VSTi receiving MIDI from an external keyboard, other MIDI tracks sending program changes to various equipment on stage)
3. Start the song (everything is great, all program changes successfully sent and the audio track is playing)
4. At some point of the song I start to play the MIDI controller that is routed to the VSTi (Atmosphere, Albino2, or any VSTi)
5. At that point (first MIDI note played), everything stutters for a second or two. Then it comes back... sometimes still in time.. sometimes it truly paused for the second or so.

It seems as though it has something to do with initializing the patch or VSTi. Maybe the VSTi isn't completely active until you hit your first note. I don't know. If I always hit a key on the keyboard prior to starting the song, it never happends. But in some cases, I can't hit that note prior to starting the song. This isn't associated with just one VSTi. Albino2, Atmosphere, B4 all do it. It will always do it when I first boot up my Powerbook, Load Live, Load a song, Start the song, Hit that first MIDI controller note a few measures into the song.... Bang, there it happens.

step 4/5 confuses me.

-A set is playing Audio and Midi program changes.
-Then you change a VSTi parameter with an external midi controller.
-Then a midi clip plays notes to that VSTi.
-Then stuttering?

No... Assume this example

1. Song starts playing Intro. Wave on track #1
2. When the verse starts, I start playing my MIDI keyboard that is routed to a VSTi in track #2
3. At the moment when I start playing my MIDI keyboard, there is a stutter in the playback. Kind of like it has to initialize the VSTi.

exact same problem here...HELP! This rules out this great software for "Live" work until I can figure this out. Dell Inspiron 8600 Pentium M 1.3 w/ 512MB RAM. I'm trying to run a few VSTi's at once as well as audio loops (Steinberg Grand, Trilogy, EVP73). Not a lot of physical memory left, paging file usage is generally 409MB, that seems high. Any help would be much appreciated.

gsbe, It looks like it happens on both platforms now. You're on the PC version. You're right, it does put a hold on things for using it live unless you remember to hit a key or two prior to starting the song.

It is possible/probable that the vst is being swapped to disk, or some important part of it is in your swap memory... especially if you aren't using it for quite a while...

you *could*... but I don't know how much performance wise this'd suck... turn off your swap and force it to not swap vsti's to disk... however this might require a quite large amount of memory to pull off efficiently.

EnjoyRC: are you saying that running Live 4 on your osx machine does not have these problems?

gaspode: large RAM chips for laptops are still very expensive these days (cheapest I can find the 1GB chips for my laptop are $226.49 a piece). My laptop will take up to 2GB of RAM, but I need to know for sure that this will solve my problems before spending that kind of cash. Depending on EnjoyRC's reply to the question above, I will consider switching platforms. I would have to purchase all of my software again which would be financially outrageous but I need a stable platform to perform with this setup. Live 4 is the way of the near future, I just need to find a computer that can handle it.

Could my buffer and latency settings help me out with this at all? I can't run the latency up to high because I am playing these VSTi's in realtime. With my M-Audio Firewire 410, I have the buffer size set to 256 Samples, an Output latency of 8ms, and an Input Latency of 6 ms = 14 ms Overall Latency. I am not running any audio samples with the HiQ settings and I'm set to 16-bit 44.1. Any thoughts on these settings?

Finally, I noticed my paging file to go from 409MB when I'm using Live 4 and multiple VSTi's to 125MB when Live is closed. Obviously this paging file is a culprit, altough I'm not seeing the Harddrive Overload light on, only CPU to 100% when clicking. I have also noticed that the CPU percentage in Live 4 does not match that of the Windows Task Manager. Seems strange...

Thanks

gsbe wrote:EnjoyRC: are you saying that running Live 4 on your osx machine does not have these problems?

It's definitely happening on my OSX PowerBook.

EnjoyRC wrote:It's definitely happening on my OSX PowerBook.

How about your Windows desktop machine?

gsbe wrote:How about your Windows desktop machine?

I can't make my Windows Desktop PC do it. Looks like it has something to do with the VSTi engine under OSX. I've got ample power and memory on my PowerBook for what I'm doing. The CPU meter only reads around 23% while playing back the audio and my VSTi at the same time.

I really hope that this issue is addressed soon. Our next performance is this coming Saturday. I'm really gonna have to be consious of hitting a key on the keyboard prior to the start of the song to wake up the VSTi.

Ableton, remember, it could be either the first note being initialized in the VSTi, or it could be the first incoming MIDI note being routed that is causing the dropout. My system is completely optimized, permissions repaired and no other apps running.

Bump, for the hopes that Ableton is going to release a maintenance fix this week!! Wooo Hooooo

Ok, I played a 4-hour gig tonight with a DJ and Live 4.0.1 responded perfectly. I was using the same plug-ins and audio files and it seemed to hold up. I did close all non-critical processes via the Task Manager before opening Live.

Seems to be looking up - VSTi's and Live is a killer combination! I still look forward to boosting my RAM, though. I am always wary to open things like the Steinberg Grand because it eats up so much memory. I use the lightest bass sounds with Spectrasonic's Trilogy and it sounds fine on stage - very real, in fact.

Dig.

_______________________
Dell Inspiron 8600: Centrino 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM, 5400 rpm internal drive
M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 - a very cool controller to use with Live
M-Audio Firewire 410 - latest driver release seems stable

gsbe wrote:Ok, I played a 4-hour gig tonight with a DJ and Live 4.0.1 responded perfectly. I was using the same plug-ins and audio files and it seemed to hold up. I did close all non-critical processes via the Task Manager before opening Live.

It seems as though it isn't a problem on Windows as I mentioned earlier. Maybe simply an OSX/VSTi/MIDI issue.

I agree with you. It's now a killer stage application!!!! I had numerous people/musicians approach me after last Saturdays gig asking me about LIVE. I bet a few of them went home to purchase or at least try it.

Ok, from your descriptions it looks pretty much like a memory swapping problem. For Live the problem is that it has no control over the memory useage of VSTis. We can't neither predict a swap nor make sure no swapping occurs fot VSTs. This is a limitation of the VST and Audio Unit standard.

But one question to sort all other error sources out. Did you switch the Monitoring/Routing before you played the first note and the "delay" occured?

Frank

Frank Hoffmann wrote:But one question to sort all other error sources out. Did you switch the Monitoring/Routing before you played the first note and the "delay" occured?

Frank

No changes prior to playing my first note.

Example: Load LIVE, Load song, Start song, play first note in the middle of the song, delay occurs.

Do you have a suggested modification for my OSX to eliminate this memory swapping issue? I'll try anything. I have 768MB of ram. I don't think my system would be swapping yet with only one stereo audio track and one VSTi loaded?????? Unless OSX swaps memory differently than WindowsXP.