Ableton Forum

hey all, I bought myself a 2Ghz imac G5 this weekend and have been having the most unexpected and confusing dropouts with it.

This is an upgrade from my pb g4 12" laptop. I am am completing a mix on the G5 i started on the pb. I am running 17 stereo tracks (some only play for a bar or two but there is 17 tracks in all) maybe 4-5 are in RAM, and they are all small files of a few MB. the rest are streaming off disk. I have not had a single problem wiritng this and dozens of songs like it on the pb, but i am working on the iMac now, and i get these fucked up glitches where the tempo drops a couple bpm, or the song just drops out for a millisecond or two.....the disk overload light doesnt go off, the CPU activity meter usually spikes when these dropouts happen, but only from 13% avg to a 24%, spike, never getting over 30% throughout the song.....i'm at a total and utter loss how this machine, which is over twice as fast and shows no signs of problems otherwiseis having such weird playback issues.

Anyone have any suggestions?

are these long (4 minutes or more) audio files?

and what output latency are you using.

if you are not using any inputs, do you have the input in audio pref's turned off?

AdamJay wrote:are these long (4 minutes or more) audio files?

and what output latency are you using.

if you are not using any inputs, do you have the input in audio pref's turned off?

Some of the files are more than 4 min long in total length, though i use only 10-15 sec clips of them at any given time in the arrangement view

actually i didnt even think to look at this until reading yr reply, and surprisingly, i am at 512, when i have been at 256 on my laptop sinced the day i installed Ableton on it...

I have the same i/o i have always used on my laptop -3/4 for drum machine and 5/6 for keyboard, everything else switched off

there is really no logical explanation, the only thing i have more of on the older lappy is ram 768 compared to 512 in the iMac, but running activity monitor shows i still have unused ram.....no sensible explanation. It seems to improve after playing the song a few times, the first couple passes are glitchy and fucked and then it sorts itself out....very strange

email [email protected] and see if they have any ideas.

Hi rajcoont,

when you check the memory usage in the Activity Monitor, how much physical and how much virtual memory are used from Live?

regards,
Alex