Ableton Forum

Hey all,

I'm running Live w/ a MOTU UltraLite in live situations with my band and we have been running in to some slight problems. We have a two midi controllers (padKONTROL and Alesis ControlPad) used to trigger clips, basically whole songs, and occasionally they have seemed to "skip". I assume this is a buffering issue and I was wondering if anyone had any tips on optimizing the hardware and Live to make better use of both resources.

I've got a new (July 2k9) MacBook Pro, 2.53 GHz/4GB memory and have been running Live 8.1 (downloading 8.1.1 now). Just recently realized I could turn off a number of the inputs & outputs as we aren't routing audio as of yet, just need the two master outs:

- Sample rate: 48khz
- Buffer size: 256 samples
- Driver Error Compensation: -8.00 ms

Haven't set up the MOTU in any special way, but it is running at the same sample rate of 48khz. We've recentlly been focusing on stopping all samples after a song is done as to reset the clock so it doesn't overtax the machine.

Any advice on how to better dial these setting in would be much appreciated! If more info is needed on our setup let me know.

If you're source music isn't in 48 khz you might just turn it down to 44.1 khz. Saves some bandwith and might fix the performance issue you have. What bit depth are the samples taken? 16, or 24?

Some of my source samples (and the ones that are basically full songs, 2-4 mins each) are 48khz, although some shorter samples are 44khz. should i be syncing them all up?

You can try setting the output to 44.1 KHz to see if that solves the audio frame dropping issue.

I have the exact same setup. I can run my session :

latency : 48 samples.

My dry vocal (after the preamp) is splitted : one signal goes into the FOH and the other goes into Live for my vocal fx returns. So the small latency doesn't give any trouble

the driver error compensation only applies to recording audio, it is the amount that live will move the audio file after you hit stop to adjust for latency

also disabling the digital ins/outs directly on your card can save some bandwidth

when you say skips do you mean, audio dropout or audio glitch? when this happens what is your CPU% at? do you have any other programs running?

chances are if you are only running samples and not much in the effect or instrument category, you arent going to "overtax the machine" and certainly the clock running will not do that

there is also the fact that sometimes live screws up, for a while i could be doing all sorts of things with no pops or crackles but when i would press one button on my controller, live would send out an audible pop without any spike in CPU and only when audio was playing, even if the track that it had control of was muted

thanks for all this everyone - has been very helpful.

i disabled most of the ins/outs and that seems to have helped immensely. didnt think about instruments taking up more bandwidth but totally makes sense - might try and bounce some drum machine tracks to samples and see if that helps improvement. played a show the other night with no issues so that was great!