Ableton Forum

OK so for some reason this keeps happening

I have a Dell P4 3GHz processor with 3 Gigs of ram. This is a brand new computer I have little to anything on it besides Live and NI Maschine one computer game and a bunch of samples I have a 750Gig hard drive and its only used like 75 to 100 gigs.

Now when I load tutorials from this site called and it will have a bunch of stuff loaded in and what not Ill play back and it clips and stalls and drops out!

Does this have to do with my audio setting im just the sound card in the computer and going out 8th inch jack to my sound board.

Now this is the first PC i have ever used for music I did have an Imac that seemed to have much lower specs than this and it never had these problems. but thats gone now.

but like even if i put the sample rate and the driver error compensation all the way up or in between nothing changes it just cant handle it.

Why is that Am i just doing something wrong do i need to get and external soundcard for my CPU let me know please im pulling my hair out..


And if this is just a silly easy fix that i dont see cuz im on a Windows based system my bad but im still going insane

P4? I assume it's not a Pentium 4... Even so.

Yes, it's probably to do with the audio settings / system.

Getting a proper soundcard, external or internal would probably be a good idea for a number of reasons. There's a lot of choice out there but that depends on what you need.

Short of doing that the main thing you should do is see if you can use the ASIO4ALL driver for your internal sound.

http://www.asio4all.com/

When that's installed select it in the audio settings in Live.

A P4 (It must be a Pentium 4) will be totally underpowered for anything other than very basic stuff in Ableton, regardless of RAM.

My P4 2.8ghz really struggled with more than a few basic tracks with effects racks in live 7.

You really need a Core2Duo Processor or better.

Core 2 duo is a good start.

I broke through into wonderland when I got a quad core. Since then the only things that have held me back are the hard drive speed and the sound card latency/drop-outs. (My Edirol external UA25 seems really bad for this on Live 8, but firing up my old VSL2020 seems to have fixed it).

I would recommend a quad core to anyone wanting to use Ableton to really go to town on VSTs, effects and racks.

If you're doing mainly loop-based work with few effects, get separate system and data hard drives and make the data drive as fast as possible. If money were no object I'd probably look into a flash memory drive... (But I'd want to back up often. They wear out, apparently.)

That's true, although I have used an old Athlon laptop (2003 vintage) for some stuff until recently and it's still not totally incapable. I'd still say that basic sound problems are probably more to do with the soundcard / drivers at this point. Using on-board sound as the OP apparently is you will probably want to try ASIO4ALL at the very least.

Just surprised that a brand new computer would have a Pentium 4 in it.

It doesn't. Quick look on the Dell site (search for P4 3GHz) showed up a dual core processor.

That should be fine.

Did seem unlikely. ASIO4ALL IS U OP.

DJ Tequila wrote:It doesn't. Quick look on the Dell site (search for P4 3GHz) showed up a dual core processor.

That should be fine.

It was refurb of ebay....Im a dumbass and dint really realize a year ago what i really needed

Eek!