Ableton Forum

I've run into a fairly serious show-stopper: Live randomly plays back my songs with up to a 10-20 BPM variation. This naturally affects the pitch, too. Deleting my preferences file only makes it go from slower to faster, or vice versa. It's kind of weird and hard to describe. What makes it even more confusing is that normally when I tinker with the tempo via Live's global tempo indicator, the samples get all fluttery and stretched to hell.

But with this issue, even though it's playing faster (or slower), the samples themselves sound "normal," albeit now pitched higher or lower, depending.

I'm using an M-Audio Firewire 410, which doesn't support Snow Leopard yet. (I know, I know). The problem started when I upgraded, which makes me think it's an M-Audio issue, but I was just wondering if it could be a global tempo/pitch issue within Live. If not, I'll roll back to vanilla Leopard.

Also, feel free to hijack this thread to bitch about M-Audio's driver support. They're terrible. I don't understand why a company with their resources can't get a driver out the door when pretty much every other company had them within a day or two. What makes it extra retarded is that they can't be bothered to communicate an ETA. Instead, you're supposed to check back in with them from time to time.

Would it kill them to set up a Twitter feed or something? I know they don't want to because they'll get inundated with irate people wanting to know WTF is taking so long, but my answer to that is well then don't take so long.

Hey!

I've been digging through the forum here trying to find a solution to the same problem you just stated above. It's so hard to describe (like you said). So much so it also makes it twice as hard to search here.

I just upgraded to 10.6.2 Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro and I now have the same problem. Later I found the upgrade for Ableton to 8.1 but the issue didn't resolve itself. The other difference (from yours)is I'm using the internal Core audio on the Mac. No external audio cards plugged in via. USB or FW. I was testing out my new OS at work and thought I'd play in Ableton for a bit and discovered this issue.

Has anyone helped solve this for you?
Any leads? I'd love to get it figured out.

Thx!

cb

Just a question... does it make a difference if you change the sample rate that you're running the session at?
Try 44.1kHz if you're running at 48 and let us know...
I had a similar problem running thru my DIGI002 - same company... same crap updates...

BTW....I just wanted to tell you the sample flip from something else and back to my current setting worked! So thank you! It's funny this happened to me many years ago but sometimes its hard to remember all of the little fixes. So again thx so much for your reply!!!!

No problem!