major Live audio problem : please help

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 1:38 am

alright, I am not sure if this is the right part of the forum to post on, but here's my problem anyway. I have been pushed to the point of almost wanting to throw my laptop out the window and gettin a one man band set up like the dude down at the county fair. Well, on to the problem. First off, I am running a HP laptop, Pentium 4, 2.4ghz, and 1 gig of RAM (brand new). - Now, while working in Live I have about 25 tracks or so, but only about 10 playing sound at any one time, with like 6 or 7 effects. The thing is, when I open up the set and play it though the first time, my computer runs at about 30-50% throughout and there are no rough spots. Mind you that I have to run at 32000 sample rate to lower the CPU load. So, all is fine and dandy, not the best sounding, but I can sequence a song and get the structure nice and worked out. Now heres the main problem, after stopping and replaying the exact same song over and over, the CPU usage goes constantly up. The same section of the song that was playing at 30% cpu before is now playing at 75+% and the audio is completely getting mangled so much I have to either shut down my computer manually of wait a few minutes till it ends. I can't for the life of me figure out whats goin on. I have purchased a brand new hard drive, upgraded my RAM, and am pretty much running a virus free computer. Can anybody point me out to as why my computer is behaving so glitchy? Is this an Ableton problem, or do I maybe have a bad processor? Any help would be appreciated.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 1:50 am

based on your computer description, what you're describing isn't too far out of line with what i've experienced on mine. fortunately i rarely need more than a couple of tracks, so i never get too hot under the collar.

the part that is disturbing is that the cpu usage climbs. i'm not sure what to make of that.

tips to lower cpu usage: do not use complex warp mode unless it's really necessary. certainly you should never have this as your defauld warp mode!

bounce vsti tracks to audio, keep a midi track for each one, and then delete the vsti's from your set.

set your reverbs to economy mode until you need to render or resample. use return/sends to use a single effect, rather than having multiple instances on several tracks (for appropriate things, i.e. delays,verbs=yes, compressor=no)

there's the track freeze feature but i'm a bit scared of it myself. this may be completely irrational. people often complain about it though so i stay clear.

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:30 am

thanks for the quick reply. I just ran the Live 5 performance test and heres what happened. It started fine, but was all the way up at 70%......I let it play for about a minute and all of a sudden the program started squeakin and burpin like a little rotten baby. So I stopped it, and pressed play again. Same settings and all, and it starts floatin around 80% until it complety goes bonkers again. Then I pressed play again and the song wont even run without comletely sounding like audio constapation. I have no clue what is goin on here, it can't be a bad hard drive, because I have a brand new one, can't be the RAM cause thats new also, and my computer is relatively fast at 2.4ghz. I can't figure it out at all.

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:31 am

Mess around with the audio buffer size and the plug in buffer size in the Options->Preferences menu, the higher these are the more MIDI latency you'll have but the audio will flow better. I only run 512 Mb RAM (I need to up that, but I'm lazy) and I tend to change this depending on what kind of project I'm doing.

Don't use 33kHz sampling, use at least 44.1, you owe yourself that much.

Make sure there aren't any programs running in the background. Reading a PC optimisation guide can really help This one is really good.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:36 am

check to see if hyperthreading is turned off.

im fairly certain this is the root of your problems.. thats if your notebook does indeed have hyperthreading

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:37 am

I had my latentcy pretty low, switched to 512 buffer, testing now, we'll see if that helps.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:39 am

while your description of track count, etc seemed in line with my computer (2.6 P4), mine goes about 42% consistently on the test. so something's up

disabling hyperthreading shaved 2-3% for me. i'd say it's worth doing but it's not all that big of a deal

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:59 am

messed with audio and plug-in buffer and I don't have hyperthreading, and I still get the same problem. Always starts out descently but always seem to crap out after a few minutes . I can even let the loop play out and somehow the cpu jumps at some random point, really wierd.

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 3:23 am

I forgot this:
Options -> Preferences -> Audio -> (very bottom) CPU Usage Threshold. That's the setting at which Live let's your PC crap out.

With a set that big you don't want to hit the RAM button in Clip View. Live doesn't know what you're gonna launch next so it has to have at least the start of all the clips in RAM, putting a single clip entirely into RAM eats uses it up.

Is there ANYTHING running in the background?

if that doesn't work, get a kick drum, tie it to your back, put strings from your feet to drumsticks on each side, get an accordion...

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 5:05 am

are you using the on-board audio on your laptop? have you checked out the asio4all sound drivers?

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 7:10 am

Tried the ASIO4ALL drivers, and not much changed. Still same problem. When I first start the test its as low as 45%, then jumps to 60 and up from there. Has this happened to anyone else? I have ruled out the hard drive, sound card, and RAM, what else other then the program itself could it be?

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:47 pm

i'd say based on what you're saying there's no way it can be the program. i've never heard of this happening in the performance test. (could be wrong)

i'm not convinced that you've _ruled out_ anything except possibly the RAM.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 8:39 pm

Phokus wrote:Tried the ASIO4ALL drivers, and not much changed. Still same problem. When I first start the test its as low as 45%, then jumps to 60 and up from there. Has this happened to anyone else? I have ruled out the hard drive, sound card, and RAM, what else other then the program itself could it be?

yes this has happened to me but only with hyperthreading ON which you say you dont have (but id like you to double check in the bios)

cheers.

theshaggyfreak · Post by **theshaggyfreak** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 8:55 pm

I had simular problems with nearly the same HP laptop, and most of the problems were due to denormalization. I got myself a powerbook and am much happier.

Phokus · Post by **Phokus** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 11:38 pm

I think I am definitely on the same path as you. My next computer will surely be a Macbook or Imac, they seem to have much sturdier hardware, and much fewer problems such as viruses or driver issues.

By the way, I looked through my BIOS and can't seem to find anything out about hyperthreading, is there something special I should look for? Only thing I can find is video buffer settings and a few other things.

Well, its just time to wait til I can save up some money for the Mac!