Ableton Forum

hi,

i'm having a problem with a project.

i was working yesterday on a song (+-80 tracks) at about 60-75% cpu, all was fine.

Today when i started up the track the cpu was at 250% without even playing.

i notice my master track being corrupt as no sound passes true its input (external output does work on individual tracks so the master is broken..)

You cant replace a master track as far as i know ...?

also i went in digging for the cpu draining devices in all my tracks. i narrowed them down to a ableton reverb, eq and multidynamics and some parallel aux tracks in a group with effects on .

Replacing the aux tracks themselves (not the group) helped a lot and turning the reverb and eq off and on also fixed several % cpu , but when doing that to the multiD. it didnt work, infact replacing or adding a fresh multiD to the project meant adding another 150% cpu which was very weird.

So several hours later i was fiddling and resetting my master output in preferences in combination with some fiddling with my windows playback devices ... i managed in some way to reopen my initial corrupt project with a working master playing at 60% cpu. So i saved an increment and opened that... resulting again in the 250% cpu problem. So i think the file is more or less fine, although the ableton opening process corrupts it.

so i'm wondering

-if there is a 'hard' way to repair/reset ableton devices like you could do with external vst's?
-if there is a way to repair a master track without importing a project ? => because importing doesnt include send/return tracks (which i have a lot of)
-if there is any knowledge on resetting the sound playback device to repair cpu problems of a project?
-if aux tracks could cause audio feedback to overload and corrupt signal chains (tracks/master) and/or audio effect devices?

I know there are a lot of issues on cpu but none covered my questions.


Ableton 8.2
Win 7 64bit
cheers and thanks.

have you tried the 64bit beta?
Couldn't hurt to just give it a try, 80 tracks is a lot.
Also freezing tracks.

With hight track counts like that eventually your going to have to commit some decisions and move on.
Even in this day and age computers can only handle so much.

Everyone runs into CPU problems at some point. First thing to do is click the little I/O button in session view and turn off all of your unused inputs/outputs if you haven't already. Can save a lot of CPU if you're working with a lot of tracks. Otherwise it sounds like it's time to do some consolidation, freezing, and flattening. If you have lots of little sound effects it probably makes sense to use a single audio track for as many as you can and then turn effects on and off as you need them.

80 tracks? Wow, I can't get past 50 tracks without overwhelming CPU spikes, I have had to do all the above just to get by. Flatten, freeze, group... but yeah, with 64 bit you can access more ram double than 32 bit at only 4gb.

Also perhaps you should try to "resample" tracks that have complex synths on them.

I also REWIRE which wack the cpu load. So I have had to try to work around these deficiencies till 64 bit is actually "out".

haysoos criminy, 80?....ask yourself how many of those are essential....mute track as it plays and objectively delete as many as you can...freeze/flatten any midi...rendering groups of audio and bringing them back in a a single audio (last ditch)

This keeps happening to me, even after a clean reinstall of the OS and live.

I find a restart or 2 fixes it.

I really wish we weren't all unpaid beta-testers for all these buggy versions lately.

Max Daily

well i started over from a previous increment save where 60%cpu was still present.

After 4 hours of redoing things i think the nesting or grouping of tracks is what causes the massive cpu and corruption of things.

The 60% cpu was still present before i started organizing in grouptracks. Ableton probably has a problem with those while opening a session.

To specify i think ableton is a bit buggy with additional fx on group tracks. It hit me that most of the corruptions i ever had were on group tracks.

I now routed in submixes in stead of just grouping tracks and managed to get to the same point as my corrupt session still having that 60% cpu.



On the topic of freezing and flattening things, the method is only opportune if you have huge amounts of fx in a chain or have things running as a massline.
If you freeze as a habit you might hit a point where having 80 tracks of 96k wav is more cpu demanding as a vst chain buffering/unbuffering in 32k as an offline method.
This just in my experience...

on win7 be sure setting the energy mode on High permormances and not Economy.
For laptops it is a must do!

EDIT:

Live 8.2

Updating to 8.3.3 cannot hurt you

veto88 wrote:After 4 hours of redoing things i think the nesting or grouping of tracks is what causes the massive cpu and corruption of things.

The 60% cpu was still present before i started organizing in grouptracks. Ableton probably has a problem with those while opening a session.

To specify i think ableton is a bit buggy with additional fx on group tracks. It hit me that most of the corruptions i ever had were on group tracks.

I now routed in submixes in stead of just grouping tracks and managed to get to the same point as my corrupt session still having that 60% cpu.

Is it known bug and being worked on by dev?

I dont know if its known. As mentioned i still used 8.2, upgrading later on after i finish this project.

Cheers