Ableton Forum

Every time I drag & drop a *.WAV file into Ableton Live, v11.0.12, it sounds horribly corrupted. The files sound perfectly fine when played by Media Player Classic or WMP. So the files are not the problem. All the drivers on my fairly new PC are up-to-date. Is there a setting that might be causing the problem?

Most common problem I've seen is the WAV file being 32-bit integer or actually being another file type (like MP3) with .wav extension by mistake.

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... le-Formats

If I record with a microphone in Ableton, the same degraded sound plays back. I have Ardour, Reaper and Audacity installed, and do not experience the issue.

My copy of Ableton is an upgrade of v9 that was bundled with Focusrite. So I'm thinking now that maybe the program is purposely limited. I will contact Sweetwater. Very frustrating.

Maybe it is one of those problems:

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... o-dropouts
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... e-CPU-load
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... -for-Audio

Thanks you for taking the time to share the links. They helped.

I have only 5.8 ms latency in Tracktion's Waveform v11.5, input sample rate also set to 256, output at 512, without degraded audio quality. So I increased the Input buffer size in Ableton to 2048, and output also to 2048. That resolved the problem. Then I lowered input to 1024, to see how much I can reduce the latency without affecting audio quality. Oddly, I am back to 256 for Input and 512 for Output, without the problem. So my CPU is somehow managing the load better.

Should I set the Input buffer size smaller than the Output size? If I have the Output set below 512, the Test Tone stays dirty, regardless of how high great Input buffer size. So I'm thinking to set the Input size as small as possible and the Output at 512, just before the Test Tone gets dirty. Am I correct, or is there a rule to follow?

I don't record anything really, so I actually disable audio input completely. Which probably also means you can lower input buffer too I guess? Seems they are independent.