Ableton Forum

Hi,

I'm fairly new to using Live 8 and am coming across audio problems when using it. Basically, any song that I play has a serious loss of audio artifacts and sounds completely distorted and crackled (almost like a sound that comes through when you significantly reduce the pitch or detune quite a bit) Below is the configuration/system that I'm using:

PC: Sony Vaio F Series
OS: Windows 7 Professional
RAM: 4 GB
Processor: i7 Q 740 @1.73 GHz
Ableton: Live 8.2.1
Audio Driver: ASIO
Sound Card: M-Audio Connectiv

After testing for various sample rates, I know that it is not related to the buffer size; and the cpu usage hovers around 2% so it's not a lack of cpu resources either. At this point, it seems to be related to OS so I wanted to inquire if this is a known problem of using Live with Windows 7. I installed Live on the Windows XP mode that comes with 7 professional and everything sounds ok there which further leads me to think it is related to Windows 7.

Any ideas on what the problem and solution might be?

Thanks

I'm having a very similar issue on a Mac using OS X Lion.

PC: MacBook Pro
OS: Lion 10.7.2
RAM: 8 GB
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Ableton: Live 8.2.6
Sound Card: Apogee Duet USB / M-Audio Firewire 1814 (i've tried with both)

The problem I'm having is when playing live midi instruments, midi drums to be precise, I get cracks in the audio, randomly, the same cracks you get when the fader is clipping, but it's not clipping. I've even test it with the audio for the drum track off while playing the instrument, and it still does it.

I've tested all the sample rates and buffer size configurations, always trying to keep the latency bellow 10ms, and the issue persists, even when the CPU usage is no more than 20%.

Another test I did, to make sure it wasn't a CPU or audio interface issue, was using Reason, loading up a big drum kit and playing it with the most CPU intensive settings, getting the latency down to 1ms, and pushing the CPU to the limit (80%) while playing - no artifacts at all.

Same issue here, Macbook Pro, Lion.

@mayank247

Are you using a USB 3 port on your vaio to connect the sound card?

I have an f series Vaio (vpcf13m8) and I've found the usb 3 ports have compatibility problems with my bcr2000 and also the AKAI sound box I just bought.

When using the AKAI box on the USB 3 port the sound is completely broken and distorted similar to what you describe.

If your machine has a USB 2 port or a combined eSATA/USB 2 port try that.

I also had to disable the wireless network and the ACPI battery control method in device manager to get the audio working smoothly.