Ableton Forum

At first I thought that this might be due to some sort of static electricity interference as it was produced twice after I stepped back up to my laptop after walking around the room for a minute or two while listening to a Live set playback. But, then last night after making sure that I had no electrical charge about myself Ableton again suddenly blasted me with the most terrible digital screaming imaginable. I mean, this sound actually makes me feel frightened to attempt Live sets. When this digital scream begins occuring, which I cannot stop within Ableton until I restart my CPU, Ableton's master meter is absolutely maxed out and no ammount of db level reduction on the master or any other channel will aleviate it. One thing I did notice last night was that it kept occuring when my drum kit was being signalled by midi to play several floor toms in rapid succession. I would absolutely love some insight into this situation.

Hi TaoNao,

I am afraid without a little more info it´s hard to shed any light into this:
- which version of Live have you been using?
- what´s your computer / audio hardware?
- what did the Liveset which was opened contain? if you can still reproduce the problem with the specific Liveset, please send it to [email protected], so we can have a look

Best,
Jörg

jok wrote:Hi TaoNao,

I am afraid without a little more info it´s hard to shed any light into this:
- which version of Live have you been using?
- what´s your computer / audio hardware?
- what did the Liveset which was opened contain? if you can still reproduce the problem with the specific Liveset, please send it to [email protected], so we can have a look

Best,
Jörg

I am currently running Live 8.04 on a Dell 1520 laptop, 4 gigs RAM, 2.2 Ghz dual core, 7200 RPM hard disk. I use an Native Instruments Audio Control 1 for my sound. The Live set I was working on during that particular instance, which it has made this digital blast during several projects and sometimes during recording, contained several audio tracks with loops I had created within Live, a number of different effects, an instance of Kontakt playing some sampled drums with surround panning, and a couple of midi tracks containing Vst synths. I had picked up a few ideas across the web that it could be an effect of having my buffer size set to low in Audio Kontrol 1's setup so I boosted the buffer size from 128 to 256 and had no occurrences of the digital blast last night. But, nevertheless I would love to know that this is the actual problem or what the problem is so that I can take truly preventative steps against it. In my experience, if I do a restart on the computer the Live set will generally open back up and play through many many times without any digital blast occurrence, but then suddenly out of nowhere it or another set will "apparently" randomly produce it. Thank You for your time, Aaron Michael Dunn

Hi TaoNao,

it could be a buffer size issue, could also be a VST issue (to narrow the problem down, try deactivating your VST folder and reload the set - this time it will get loaded without 3rd party plug-ins). Also I would recommend to download and install Live 8.1:
www.ableton.com/latest_versions

Best,
Jörg

Interesting.

I have the same problem, but have hit a brick wall trying to get it sorted out with Ableton. The Abes need an example set which it happens in, but it's too intermittent, and doesn't seem to happen at all if I remove my VSTs from the project.

What VSTs are they, and how heavily is your CPU loaded (i.e. is it a big project?) I definitely get the problem if I have a pretty full project with lots of instances of Atmosphere, Massive and my Virus TI VST.

I've just installed Live 8.1, and I'm having the same problem. I have a cymbal sample that plays every 4 bars, and every once in a while, instead of a cymbal sound I get a very loud scream. It doesn't happen all the time, so it's difficult to recreate. It's in a new song created with 8.1.

I'm running Live 8.1 on a 2.53ghz Intel MacBook pro with OSX 10.6.2 with 4g ram.

that is just downright frighting...

Just thought that I would chime back in on this topic and inform anyone concerned that I think the problem is N.I.'s Audio Kontrol 1's over sensitivity to electrical spikes. It seems that this same problem has been solved by many others by running all gear through a surge protector. Problem is not within Ableton. I have confirmed this mainly due to the same occurence of digital blasting taking effect through audio applications when Ableton wasn't running at all. And obviously I need to go back to grammar school as I seem to be having the most extremely difficult time correctly spelling "occurence", which is obviously wrong.