Ableton Forum

Hi guys, got a quick question -
prior to me asking this I just want you to know that I have already adjusted the settings on my ozone midi as well as tried nearly every setting within ableton prefrences. I'm running nanoKontrol along with M-Audio Ozone midi keyboard, I'm trying to be able to switch between effect devices per channel WITHOUT getting the known audio hiccup. Tried almost everything and can't come to senses with it. Anyone has any ideas? The midi mapping wasn't a problem, it's just that every time I try to switch between the devices, be it nanoKontrol, laptops arrow keys or the M-Audio Ozone keys I still get the 1/4 of a second of audio pause and it's driving me up the wall. Help?

post your system specs.

larger buffers, lower sample rates, shoot for 2 or more Gb of RAM.

My specs are windows vista, 64bit, 4gigs of RAM, SP1. Running it with M-Audo Ozone midi and nanoKontrol but no matter which one I use, be it keys on the Ozone, buttons on nano or arrow keys the cpu still goes sky rocketing for a split second causing the audio to stop for a split second

What are you using as your audio interface? If it's not dedicated then your problem probably lies in the fact that most of your computing power is used processing sound. Meaning when you change MIDI devices less processing is available to process that sound and you hear a hiccup. If you have a dedicated audio interface then I have no idea what the problem could be.

celestial wrote:My specs are windows vista, 64bit, 4gigs of RAM, SP1. Running it with M-Audo Ozone midi and nanoKontrol but no matter which one I use, be it keys on the Ozone, buttons on nano or arrow keys the cpu still goes sky rocketing for a split second causing the audio to stop for a split second

what processor do you have?

also look into tuning up your machine. look for "XP DAW tuning" web pages, there are many. turn off the interweb connection, things like that.

Run the DPC latency checker and find out which drivers cause system glitches. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml (on my ancient P4 laptop with XP SP3 and 2GB ram, the score is usually around 180, with peaks that top out at 400 - in Vista, on my Core2Duo T8100, 4GB ram, VIsta Ultimate 32 SP2 the average is about 550 with peaks that can spike up to 1600) and I got that down from running an average 1000, peaking at over 2,000 (which is glitch city for audio) by disabling drivers and services etc.

In Vista, system latency is always higher than XP, making ultra low level tracking work very difficult - but for example, in my case, I discovered wifi, the DVD player/writer and wired network drivers contirbuted significant system latency, so I disable them when making music. I also go into task manager and turn off a bunch of unnecessary services, such as the fingerprint sensor, webcam and other things.

64 bit is still a crapshoot on Vista. M-Audio only recently introduced Vista 64 drivers and M-Audio are not known for writing stable, well performing drivers on any platform. But check their website to see if they updated any of the drivers on the Ozone. Also, check your graphics driver - this is a FREQUENT cause of audio crap outs in Vista. Check that is the most updated and then upgrade Vista to SP2, that works better than SP1 on my system for my audio and MIDI devices.

I don't have a webcam or anything else running on this laptop. I am however feeding the audio through the midi itself HOWEVER I still get the hiccup from nanoKontrol so I highly doubt that that's the problem. I don't have that laptop hooked up to internet simply 'cause I want to avoid any risks of getting a virus but if you think SP2 will help then I'll do it. I'm not 100% sure though 'cause I upgraded to sp2 on my other regular computer (desktop) and have been having nothing but problems since.

Do you guys think that getting a separate soundcard like Maya would help? again this may not work since I get the hiccup from all 3 places that I'm using - laptop keyboard, nanoKontrol as well as M-Audio Ozone.

I already installed the driver for M-Audio Ozone for a 64bit in order for it work on Vista since it wouldn't work before so that's the latest I can get on that. This laptop being brand new I wouldn't think I would need to get any other "newer" drivers for it.

I read the manual already and was gonna go through it again tonight just for the sake of it, turned to you guys to see if you may have any suggestions. Getting the tracks to play in RAM mode didn't work as the manual suggested, freezing won't work because it'll freeze my audio and I don't want to do that.

My exact problem is not with producing but with djing on ableton and selecting between the effect devices per each channel. No matter what source I use to go between the devices it doesn't want to work flawlessly (except for few times that it did but then went back to normal "stupid hiccup"). The cpu is running at around 20 but when I switch between effect devices it jumps up to 400 or whatever and then gets back down to 20.

Just a last chance guess, you tried asio 4 all?

sorry if you have

Didn't try it yet. U think it might help?

asio4all might help.

have you run the DPC latency checker yet ? What scores are you running ???

Like I said before, various device drivers, including your DVD player driver, graphics driver, ethernet, whatever drivers, even if you don't use wifi, have you disabled the driver, etc.

Failing this, try a different soundcard. Try turning off multicore processing in Live (and other DAWS) and see if that helps, that helps with some i7 machines.

You have to be prepared to dig into the control panel and hardware devices to see if you can cure this problem. Lastly, are there any IRQ conflicts ???

leedsquietman wrote:asio4all might help.

have you run the DPC latency checker yet ? What scores are you running ???

Like I said before, various device drivers, including your DVD player driver, graphics driver, ethernet, whatever drivers, even if you don't use wifi, have you disabled the driver, etc.

Failing this, try a different soundcard. Try turning off multicore processing in Live (and other DAWS) and see if that helps, that helps with some i7 machines.

You have to be prepared to dig into the control panel and hardware devices to see if you can cure this problem. Lastly, are there any IRQ conflicts ???

can't run the DPC latency checker 'cause I don't have that thing hooked up to internet to avoid viruses, here's what I did -

read somewhere online yesterday that having 2-4 plug-ins or whatever per channel makes ableton somehow distribute the cpu load more evenly rather than having 15 or so per channel. I tried this and unfortunately it didn't work very well. What I did discover was that when I unplugged nanoKontrol and just used ozone and tried using the keyboard keys to switch between plug-ins the glitch (spike in cpu) didn't happen, similar to when I used ONLY nanoKontrol and disabled ozone's midi in ableton's preferences and used it ONLY AS A SOUNDARD, same thing - no glitch/hiccup problems.

My only understanding from this is that I actually need to get a separate soundcard if I want to use two of the midi devices, however last thing I want to do is to fork out another 150 bucks on yet another soundcard (tascam us-144 didn't bother to make a 64-bit driver yet) just to find out that I am still having this problem with 2 midi devices.

btw downloaded the latest version of live, 8.0.4 last night, but couldn't bother to work on it anymore after 3 hours of sleep sunday night, and knowing that I'm only gonna get 3 and a half hours last night, will try it tonight when I get out of work. Hopefully it'll help, somewhat at least.

I got it guys, it was the Remote button that was on on the OUTPUTS of each device inside preferences that was causing the problem, btw doing the update didn't work.

The reason for the hiccup/glitch is if you have the OUTPUT Remote turned on the midi data is being originally sent into ableton to control it (input) and then being sent back into the device (output). I read that this mainly has advantages for thigs like mixers with automated sliders and stuff like that. So for anyone out there that might come across a problem like this - check the midi settings in preferences

Glad you got it sorted mate, cheers for heads up

oh ofcourse dude, it's only fair you know, you guys tried helping me so it's only fair if I come and share the solution with everyone, you never know, there could be someone in the future with a similar problem and then they see this thread and it'll avoid useless threads