Ableton Forum

Heya guys, this is probably a really n00b question, but, I just got a new used laptop and have been using Ableton on my desktop just fine. The laptop a winxp AMD XP-M 2400 with 730 m ram and a 40 gig HD. Well, sometimes I get little "hiccups" or very short dropouts of audio. It doesn't happen very often, and seems to occur most often when I'm in the middle of changing a setting or triggering a clip. I'm playing two full 7+ minute dance tunes along with some short percussion clips over it, could it be a hard drive issue? The laptop is a bout a year and half old so the HD is probably only like 4100RPM. Wouldn't my performance improve if I stored my audio files on a seperate usb 2.0 drive? Also, my cpu gage is running between 40 and 50 during the set, but never goes over 60%.

I recorded it and saw that the "hiccups" are 10-15 ms gaps in audio output. I tried using the "asio4all" driver instead of the regular ozonic driver, but it still did the same thing.

4100 RPM is MORE than fast enough to play back two tracks, you can probably play back 40 tracks with that if all else is working ok. Have you defragged your drive recently?

It's a fresh install of windows on a drive formatted probably two weeks ago.

Check how much ram you're using while you're playing those tracks. Maybe it's trying to use the page file (longshot, considering how much RAM you have). Have you increased the ASIO buffers?

Have you tried playing the same thing with the Ozonic disabled -- using ASIO4All with it disconnected?