Ableton Forum

Hi All,

anyone using the ESI-Pro Waveterminal U24 under MacOS X?
see: http://www.esi-pro.com/viewProduct.php?pid=10&page=2

During yesterday's rehearsal I noticed that under Live (all versions) the settings always are set back to 16 bit resolution when starting Live.
When I switch back to 24 bit in the Audio/MIDI panel of MacOS Live just produces white noise when playing back a clip or track.
I also don't have a clue how to determine the resolution being used since checking the saved audio files is useless because that's a rendered resolution determined by the settings in Live (in my case 32bit floating point).

I'm running 10.3.9 on my PowerBook (1.5GHz) but we also tested this under 10.4.1 on a pretty new PowerBook 1.67GHz where the same thing happens.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Michael.

Hi Michael,

I fear this is simply a bug in Live that for some audio interfaces the bit depth is set back to a lower one as the one from "Audio/MIDI setup". I'm not sure if there is a workaround as long as this is not fixed.
I hope we can sort this out soon but I cannot provide a date or a version containing it.

regards,
Alex

Hi Alex, thanks for anwering!

I fear this is simply a bug in Live that for some audio interfaces the bit depth is set back to a lower one as the one from "Audio/MIDI setup". I'm not sure if there is a workaround as long as this is not fixed.
I hope we can sort this out soon but I cannot provide a date or a version containing it.

*ouch* that's a pity!
Hopefully this is on Ableton's todo-list.
If anybody knows a workaround PLS let me know.

Thanks a lot, Michael.

I toyed around a bit to find some additional information:

I launch Audio/MIDI panel and start Live 5 after that.
I can see changing the settings from 24 bit to 16 bit in the panel.
Then I set the resolution back to 24 bit in the system's Audio/MIDI panel.
As soon as I hit record even the metronome sounds distorted (a bit like white noise).

But I can adjust the settings for input and output individually in the panel.
So I can set the input's setting at 24 bit and leave the U24's output setting to 16 bit. With this setup there's no audible distortion.
Not ideal but better than everything set to 16 bit since Live renders this recorded clips to a higher resolution anyway and recalculates the stereo sum to 16 bit for CD etc. too.

Now the question:
How can I tell if this setup really records with 24 bits of resolution?
Looking at the stored AIFF files doesn't make sense to me since this data already is rendered according to the settings in Live.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot, Michael.

if you have Peak, when you open a file it will tell you its type and bitrate on the lower left hand of the screen

Hi,

wavejumper wrote:if you have Peak, when you open a file it will tell you its type and bitrate on the lower left hand of the screen

I'm afraid I don't get that:
I'm concerned about the resolution my USB interface (U24) delivers.
The resolution at what Live's files are stored is something different AFAIK (determined by what I entered in the setup).
So what is "Peak" (where can I get that, what is it) telling?

Thanks a lot, Michael.

Alex wrote: I hope we can sort this out soon but I cannot provide a date or a version containing it.

hmm ... 5.0.2 obviously was too early ...

Any ideas about determinig the actual resolution? Anybody?

thanks, Michael.

Hi eMmZee,

meanwhile we have found the reason for this behavior and the next bug fix update should solve this problem.
Until this bug fix update is out your only workaround is to set the desired bit depth in the "Audio and MIDI Setup" utility after! you have selected or changed the sample rate within Live.

regards,
Alex