Ableton Forum

Hello,

I’ve been using Ableton Live 12 together with AbleSet for a few months now, with the goal of managing my live concerts.

I use backing tracks/stems for songs that can have up to 17 stereo tracks in the worst case, but usually around 10 stereo tracks. My PC has 64 GB of RAM, two NVMe drives — one for the OS and Ableton Live, and the other for the samples — a Ryzen 9 CPU, and an RME Digiface Dante interface connected to my Allen & Heath mixing desk.

I have placed my stems on separate tracks in Ableton. I only use a compressor and an EQ on the drum and bass tracks. I don’t use any virtual instruments, because I play a hardware synth separately. I also have two MIDI tracks to trigger external events, plus one lyrics track.

To make transitions between songs as fast as possible, I created one large Live Set with all the songs placed one after another. In AbleSet, I configured my setlist using locators.

I have tried to optimize Ableton as much as possible, but I sometimes get partial audio dropouts. The sound comes back and then cuts out again. Sometimes the Disk overload indicator lights up, and sometimes it’s the CPU indicator.

I have tried using “Collect All and Save” on the project. I also tried loading the samples into RAM, but they take up too much space, since my samples are WAV 48 kHz / 24-bit files so that Ableton doesn’t have to convert them. I’m not using Warp, and at first I wasn’t using RAM mode either.

I feel like I’ve tried everything, but I still can’t find the cause. My latest test was increasing the buffer size to 1024 and then 2048 samples, but it didn’t solve the issue.

Sometimes the whole 2-hour show runs perfectly, and sometimes I get audio dropouts.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I’m getting desperate because I have a critical show in 9 days.

Thank you very much.

Is AbleSet running on the same system or on a separate system? How are they connected? If you only use 1 system, are networking services like Wifi disabled?

Some other tips...

Don’t RAM-load the whole show if it pushes memory pressure. RAM mode is best used selectively; if Windows starts paging, it can make dropouts worse.

Disable Warp on all stems

High/Best Performance power plan, disable USB selective suspend, disable Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/cloud sync/backup during the show, exclude the project/sample folders from antivirus, and keep the project fully local.

Run LatencyMon during a full 2-hour rehearsal. If buffer 2048 doesn’t fix it, that often points to driver/power/DPC spikes rather than normal CPU load.[/list]

Does it happen if you don't go through usb to the mixer (your headphone output for example ?).
What is your A&H mixer btw ? I had occasional dropouts on the QU16 we use for a theater show. I recently cleaned the usb port of the mixer and since then, it didn't happen at all. Don't know if it's just a coincidence. Time will tell.

Ableset is installed on same ableton PC (it is recomendation).

After all replies I did some tests. I can confirm that it is not due to PC but to ableton which is not able to run big project.
When I had the problem during the test, I selected 50 % of project which was on run and deactivate sample and the sound coming back.

I don't know why but it same audio engine was lost. I thunk when sample was already player ableton remove it from engine but seams not the case.

I decide to split song by song and tune abelset to multifiles project but I have 10 s between song. I not efficient but no choice.

I thunk combo ableton+ ableset really done for big show but it is not the case.

I continue to investigate to find a more robust solution because on live need to wroks everytime.

My mixer is DLive DM0 + REM digiface dante .

Thanks for your help.