Ableton Forum

hy mates!

ive just bought me a new laptop, toshiba sattelite a100, T5500 (2x1.66) 1GBram, 667fsb, nvidia go 7600 (128mb ram), using my old beloved RME multiface... my system is fully audio optimized, no extra services what-so-ever are running, (when i start my machine i have around 830mb of ram free) hard drives are defragmented, no hardware conflicts, everything by the book

im expiriecing dropouts when working with live 6(3ms latency-with multiply proccesor enabeld) even with 10% cpu...(no drive overload is indicated) somthing ive never expirienced befor with my old P4 2.8ghz 1GBram....

anyone has encounterd somthing symilar? does anyone know if somthing has changed with the PCMCIA technology?


it seems to make no sens... evrything is working much faster with this machine, but i get those drop outs, dosent matter if its 10% or 50%....


well,

thanks,

L.

I am getting this same problem, big dropouts when running at -%cpu. I am running a bran new intel core Duo on a swanky asus motherboard. The soundcard is a bran new firestudio and works fine otherwise. I can run reaktor in stand alone mode and all is fine but big dropouts in live. Not cool. Anyone have any info on this?

How about that optimization for "Background processes"?

Maybe try adding a bit more latency, 3ms is quite low...

No real info, but a friend of mine brought over his macbook and has the same problem, but in relation to changing screens in a certain song. Huge latency/dropout the first time, then not so bad the next. We were able to replicate it on my macbook pro as well. loading some of the short drum loops into RAM helped a bit, but it's still evident.
My feeling is that it's Live. I couldn't find any rational explanation for it.

I had a similar problem with a RME digi 96 at 11ms latency -- sporadic cpu spikes causing audio drop-outs. When I switched to my internal Realtek AC97 via ASIO4ALL I haven't had a single dropout at 3ms latency.

I use the pci latency tool (google it) to give the soundcard max priority, and I also use prio.exe (again google it) to set live process priority to high or realtime. Touch wood this is fixed now since it was driving me nuts!!

Andy.

got home today to find that for no reason at all the problem has gone away. ........ I am very very happy about that! I dont know what it was. I just hope it stays away.

i had a similar problem with my macbook, I would get dropouts at really low cpu and disk loads, but only when I touched the trackpad...increasing the latency fixed it for me, but it definitely seems like live 6 was flaking out...I'm assuming this was graphics issue due to the shared RAM....but who knows...

evilxsystems wrote:i had a similar problem with my macbook, I would get dropouts at really low cpu and disk loads, but only when I touched the trackpad...increasing the latency fixed it for me, but it definitely seems like live 6 was flaking out...I'm assuming this was graphics issue due to the shared RAM....but who knows...

TrackPad is on the USB bus. If using USB Audio this might become an issue.
M-Audio suggest to use the rightmost USB port for Audio, there must be a reason....Should not happen with firewire interface. BTW which Audio Interface are you using?

- Best
- Pasha

Pasha wrote:
TrackPad is on the USB bus. If using USB Audio this might become an issue.
M-Audio suggest to use the rightmost USB port for Audio, there must be a reason....Should not happen with firewire interface. BTW which Audio Interface are you using?

Hmm, that's probably it...I'm using an M-audio Transit USB interface...I'll try switching usb ports for the interface...or maybe buy a bluetooth mouse or maybe throw the m-audio in the trash and try to use the built in soundcard...
I know the built in soundcard takes spdif but does anyone knowif it can record at 24-bit?

-jason

evilxsystems wrote:

Pasha wrote:
TrackPad is on the USB bus. If using USB Audio this might become an issue.
M-Audio suggest to use the rightmost USB port for Audio, there must be a reason....Should not happen with firewire interface. BTW which Audio Interface are you using?

Hmm, that's probably it...I'm using an M-audio Transit USB interface...I'll try switching usb ports for the interface...or maybe buy a bluetooth mouse or maybe throw the m-audio in the trash and try to use the built in soundcard...
I know the built in soundcard takes spdif but does anyone knowif it can record at 24-bit?

-jason

You need a special cable to sue it as a digital interface (should be named toslink).
However internal soundcard can record as 24bit when used with standard cable.
I have already recorded some tracks that way, results were good. You can go down
128 samples with no glitches,but latency is still beyond 8ms.

- Best
- Pasha

Have similar problems when i load samples into ram with the RAM switch. Just tried resetting the audio buffer to default (512), it had been at 510 for some reason, and this seems to have helped, perhaps only temporarily though.

I also have dropouts and glitches in Live 6.0.3 on my new macbook pro. Been trying to set the buffer size value to the highest possible, but this doesn´t help. I am running on the built in soundcard, and have booted my macbook to xp, because I am using alot of free vst´s that doesn´t work on osx. Anyways, seems I get the same dropouts when I play itunes in xp. Could it be the soundcard then? I have a live-gig in less than two weeks, this cannot be happening.

I had no problems like this on my old computer (a P4 3,0 GHZ with 1 gb RAM, and inbuilt crappy soundcard.

I solved it by disabling the wireless network in xp. Probably a bug in the Bootcamp Beta.

Well< I have just recently started getting a lot of audio dropouts also. the hard drive light doesn't come on in abletons, Just the ableton cpu meter goes to 100% The funny thing is that the cpu readout in my task manager doesn't spike when the drop outs occur. It almost seems like it a program problem? Does anyone have any tips?