Ableton Forum

I have an 27"imac 2.66 quad core i5 with 8GB of ram running Live 8.2. I play breaks and the problem I have is that when ever I play tracks with a hight dynamic range, especially heavy bass track, they distort and crackle, as if they're clipping. Its as if Live is not allowing the full frequency of the tracks to come through. Even with a buffer size above 500 samples it still does the same. I've reinstalled Live and contacted the support team and nothing seems to change nor do any of the support seem to know what could be causing the problem. Its also isolated to my imac as I have a macbook pro too with no problems there.

Does anyone have any ideas or experienced similar problems? I thought it might be a problem with the core audio but there's no problems when I drop a track into Logic or any other sound playing device.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated

Just to check, have you done anything to mess with the track faders and master fader? Do the options selected in Preferences match your Macbook Pro? If you save a set (Collect All And Save) with this problem on your iMac and copy it to your MBP, does the problem still show up?

Do you have any special sound hardware on your iMac? What happens if you switch to another sound device?

And this may sound weird, but in the clip that you drop in, what does the gain fader look like? I think there's a way to define default settings for new clips and I'm wondering if the default was set to a much higher gain.

This is just a few things off the top of my head - hopefully it's of some use to you. Best of luck!