Ableton Forum

I have recently moved and set up my studio with a new soundcard. as I'm testing things out I've run it a problem.

Some basic info. (Power) there is only one grounded quad outlet in my studio. I have a battery back-up pluged into that and a rack mounted Furman Power conditioner (model m-8L) plugged into the battery backup. plugged into the power conditioner are three rack mounted powerstrips. One for my hardware synths and drum modules (in a seperate rack) and the other two for Audio effects, MIDI routing and my soundcards a MOTU 828 daisy chained to a MOTU ultralite and controlling two behringer ADA8000. All being controlled by Ableton Live, with an APC40 running on a macbook.

The issue: when running a full studio test (almost every piece of outboard gear running) I turrned on a rack lamp plugged into the Furman and Live just stopped, no sound just stopped and froze. mouse pointer still worked but live was not responding, this went on for a minute or two as I checked things eventually I got annoyed and force quite Live. Restarted everything and I was back in business.

But it happened again. An hour or so later I again need to see the front of my rack again and rather than turn on the light again I used the pull out lights on the front of the power conditioner. again Live paused (tho this time only for about 20 seconds)

Weird so it seems that turning on lights that are plugged into the power conditioner (or are built into it) causes Live to pause/freeze. Any suggestions on what I need to change to aliveiate this problem.

I think I would start with not turning on the lights.

That is very strange.

Wish I had some info to offer.

If you ever find the reason or a solution can you please post it here?

Good luck with the troubleshooting. Fun, fun, fun!

My guess is that you're getting a voltage drop from the UPS (battery backup) and another from the Furman. You are probably right at the lower limit of the voltage that the computer needs, and the lights push you over the edge. There should be no need for a power conditioner downstream of a UPS, as a typical UPS is an inverter that regenerates the power as a sine wave; there is nothing to "condition". The UPS is current-limited, so there is a real limit to how many things it can power.

You might try plugging only the computer and whatever else needs to be UPS'ed directly into the UPS, and keep everything else off it, i.e., plug your other power strips into the wall. The ground is passed right through the UPS so there is no benefit of common grounding in plugging everything into the UPS. Given only one outlet, you might try a heavy powerstrip plugged into the wall, the UPS and other non-critical stuff plugged into the powerstrip, and the computer on the UPS.

hth,

-Luddy

I would suggest the same as Luddy has..

Only the computer and any external hard drives plugged into the UPS.
Have one main power conditioner plugged into the wall outlet. I use a Monster Power 3500 for my main conditioner. Then run any secondary conditioners into that. For my secondary conditioners, I have a MP 2500 and a MP 900 along with a couple of industrial workshop-type power strips daisy-chained from that to give me outlets all along the wall under my desk. Only about half of my outlets are actually used.

have you added up the peak power required by all those devices? does your UPS have the peak output power required to run them all?

the other thing is many devices require an extra surge of power when they first fire up.

as above, i wouldn't bother running anything that doesn't really need uninterrupted power through the battery backup.

Thanks for all the help everyone. I've been away from my studio but I'll let you know how things go.

Well That fixed the issue (sort of) Turning on lights doesn't cause ableton to freeze anymore

Unfortunately I can reproduce the freezing issue by dropping a video track into session view (it warns me it will convert to audio) and then when I trigger the clip. boom live freezes.

grr, gonna test some things out. Gonna see if it occurs with an regular audio clip. I don't think I've dropped a regular audio clip during my testing so I'll see if that is the issue, or if it is just with audio converted from video. (it wasn't a very long video clip) This is odd.

I think it's about time to upgrade to Live 8.

divonic wrote:Well That fixed the issue (sort of) Turning on lights doesn't cause ableton to freeze anymore.

Er... what fixed it?

Having only the computer plugged into the battery backup fixed the issue with the lights causing Live to freeze.

Ah-ha. Thanks!