Ableton Forum

hi
im using ableton 8 on PC.

it was working fine for months.

now: say if the CPU meter at top right in ableton says 5% (minimal).
suddenly the music is distorted and the meter says 150 to 300% !
playback is not happening, freezing etc. have to shut down ableton.
once had to shut down PC fully.

the set is not labour intensive.
ive had sets with loads of tracks and its never crashed.

but now it is. its happening for two days now, reguarly and frequently.

anyone know the source of problem?

thankyou

If its been happening since a sepcific time, hen the obvious is to work out whatt happened around that time. Perhpas the recent batch of windows updates?

Another common cause for this kind of thing is a build up of dust etc on heatsink that is finally enough to cause the system to start thotlling heavily. With some motherboard BIOS handling of temperaure sensors is buggered, so when the chipset goes past a certain temp (65C on one particular board), DPC latency suddenly hits 25,000us and stay there until the temp comes back down again. With that happenning any attempt in the rest of the computer at doing anything in real time (like audio streaming) goes to hell.

First port of call - try this tool before and after it goes to hell. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

BTW - what motherboard do you have?

Try starting live in admin mode.

thankyou thankyou

the last things i installed was bomes midi translator,
and this: http://jackaudio.org/

but i dont have these running when using ableton when its crashing.
ill uninstall jackaudio as its too complicated to learn and i dont understand how to use it.

I have had more things plugged into PC lately. In the past the pc struggled to recognize and use more than 2 usb ports (even though it has loads more).

Now i have two monitors plugged in (one is not working anymore, but thats another thread entirely). Midi keyboard via midi input into PCI soundcard (echo mia midi)
UC33 via USB, a wacom tablet via USB, mouse via USB, mac keyboard into monitor via usb (as monitor has usb ports), yes mac qwerty into PC as its lighter touch to press, also had windows qwerty plugged in, but ive disconnected that now.

so im thinking it could be the combination of uc33, midi keyboard, and tablet.
as tablet often acts funny too like someone is controlling my pc randomly, i unplug it and it stops the mayhem.

No windows update.
Dust: YES, my fan used to blare so loud, actually i didnt find out if the loud noise was fan or hard drive, i opened it up, and used a dust blower to clean it. this was few months ago. a few internet tabs and half full ableton set makes the noise happen.

motherboard: gigabyte GA 8IPE775/5

not updated any vst's.
ive just been playing a basic DJ set (no VST's running) just a handful or audio clips, crash happened then too.

how do i start Live in admin mode?

cheers.

Freeze (right click choose freeze track) your tracks it you have a lot of dynamics and plugins on them.