Ableton Forum

Hi folks.

I've been using Live for a year, on a desktop PC. I recently bought a PC laptop to make it more portable (IBM Thinkpad R52), and an E-MU 1616 cardbus sound interface, to go with it.

After some interface initialisation problems (cured by a download of the latest E-MU drivers), I started playing around with the new toy.

I got the latency setting down quite low, without too much strain on the CPU, and everything sounded pretty good, but I kept finding that I had to regularly increase the ASIO latency setting to overcome terrible digital distortion (like digital clipping or a drainpipe effect).

This morning, I managed to work out that this is only happening with Live 4.1.4. All my other ASIO music apps (Acid, Fruity and Orion) seem quite happy with an ASIO latency setting of 7ms.

On further inspection, it doesn't seem to be low latency causing the problem: even with a setting of 9 or 10ms, it can still sound awful - merely the act of changing the latency setting seems to put things right again.

I haven't reported this to any official support channels yet - I thought I'd ask here first, in case it's a common problem I'm unaware of. Can anyone help or suggest diagnostic action?

I think I've found the answer. So, like a good netizen, I thought I'd post it for those poor souls searching for a similar problem in years to come.

The key was that the problem seemed to be worse with Live. I noticed that CPU usage was higher with Live than with my other music programs. So I went through all the system settings again.

At first, I couldn't see a problem. Then, I noticed a comment on the audio inputs page that reducing the number of available inputs helped with CPU resources. So, I cut down all the inputs and outputs. Immediately, the problem went away.

The E-MU 1616 generates all mono inputs as stereo ASIO pairs, so the best I could do was two pairs of dual-mono ASIO inputs. Then I had a brainwave in the middle of the night: I muted the input channel outputs, turned the aux sends to full, panned my two inputs left and right, and diverted the aux channel to ASIO IN 1/2. This effectively reduced the ASIO inputs to two mono chanels, and dropped Live's CPU meter to single figures.