Ableton Forum

So I have been running a fairly new build since last September. I have a Ryzen 2600x, OS and Ableton running on an m.2 SSD, 16 GB DDR4 RAM. Everything you would think that would make for a great audio machine. Well.... lately I have been having serious problems producing in ableton. Clicks and pops on MAX buffer sizes, *even when exporting*. I can't get rid of them without resampling the master and bouncing that out sometimes gives clicks and pops. I've even contacted Ableton and Sweetwater via phone and they can't help me figure it out. Any time I try to run my projects under 1024 buffer size I get distortion, glitches, clicks, pops, and dropouts.

I've tried switching out audio interfaces to no avail. Disabling NIC cards, antivirus software, obscure windows settings. **Nothing** seems to be able to get rid of these issuse and I am seriously starting to believe it's an issue with my CPU and the architecture on the Ryzen 2000 series CPU. I've ruled out EVERYTHING else that it could be. The tech support specialist at sweetwater even suggested flashing my BIOS. I am at my wits end on this issue.

I run intensive projects with many instances of serum, addictive drums, and audio tracks with loads of effects chains. It's not abnormal for me to get into 100-150 track counts on my projects. The strangest thing is though is that I'll check task manager while running these and I'm rarely hitting over 40% on my CPU.

After having spent on nearly $1200 on this rig I've been disappointed. I don't know where else to go from here. I just want a solid build that will run whatever Ableton can throw at it. I am really just considering swapping out my current setup for 9900k and calling it a day. If you guys here can provide any advice or just any sort of sense of direction it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I’ve read about some of the Ryzen having latency issues with cores that can’t directly access cache. Whether that effects this one, I don’t know, but the solution was disabling the offending cores.

You’re running pretty high track and plugin counts for what is considered an entry level CPU these days. Every CPU has its limits. Even the latest, greatest.

Not a recommended solution but overclocking might help.
I'm using 1700 and can't handle large projects without OCing.

One caveat when choosing a CPU for audio production is that more core does not mean more performance.
Ableton's multicore utilisation heavily depends on how tracks are routed. Check this article: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... ndling-FAQ

Try freezing or removing some heavy tracks before rendering the master, and check if the CPU meter in Live hitting 100% or more.
Moving to Ryzen 3900 or i9 9900 would help if it's the performance issue, but make sure to do everything you can before spending money..

I had issues too with my i7-7700 build, but after I switched from HDD to M2 for my music data it was OK. I had an M2 for the OS and Ableton, but I bought a second M2 from 480GB for my songs and samples. This works like a charm.......