Ableton Forum

I have first generation MacBook (DualCore) with 1 gig of RAM and I'm still fairly new to Live, but I'm finding that if I have more that about 3 or 4 audio tracks I start to get stuttering and dropouts and such. Is it just a matter of tweeking my audio settings (I'm using a firewire FA-66) and if so is there a good link on the subject? Should I upgrade to 2 gig of RAM (is it worth the $$$)? Thanks....

this sounds to me like too low audio buffer settings.
get newest drivers for your interface and set latency to 512

kselbee, what version of Live are you using? You must have 5.2 or higher to run on an Intel Mac.

What you have sounds like the classic symptoms of running a non-Universal Binary version of Live on a Macintel.

hope this helps

Pitch Black wrote:kselbee, what version of Live are you using? You must have 5.2 or higher to run on an Intel Mac.

What you have sounds like the classic symptoms of running a non-Universal Binary version of Live on a Macintel.

hope this helps

I have 6.05 which I thought was UB.

Outside of the other suggestions on the thread..

Hard drive speed matters a lot.

If you got the default drive on that mac it is 5200rpm and thats not fast enough to run many tracks of audio at once.

kselbee wrote:
I have 6.05 which I thought was UB.

Thats fine. What is the structure of your tracks? (Are they audio? MIDI? What Plug-ins are you usin, if any, and are they Universal Binary?)

What do you have your latency set to? Does increasing that help?

If you use the MacBook's built-in audio output does the problem go away? (This would point to something screwy with the FA-66 or it's drivers)

You should be able to get a FREAKING HECK load more tracks than 3 or 4....

Pitch Black wrote:

kselbee wrote:
I have 6.05 which I thought was UB.

Thats fine. What is the structure of your tracks? (Are they audio? MIDI? What Plug-ins are you usin, if any, and are they Universal Binary?)

What do you have your latency set to? Does increasing that help?

If you use the MacBook's built-in audio output does the problem go away? (This would point to something screwy with the FA-66 or it's drivers)

You should be able to get a FREAKING HECK load more tracks than 3 or 4....

It's my understanding that once LIVE is started as a UB, then it will not show or be able to use any plugs that are not UB. They won't show up in the VST/AU list.

But, Pitch, you are absolutely right. There is something very fishy here. That should barely be touching the surface. Unless you have like 30 high quality native reverbs on each track.

?????????

my gf just got a brang new 1.83 core duo macbook and I loaded up live6 and an old DJ style set I run on my athlon 2200 and whenever I triggered a new clip the audio playback would hesitate slightly

really strange

should eat my laptop for breakfast

it's with a FW-410

but even just when I first loaded it up I'm sure it was with the onboard sound

have to check that again though

if the macbook is brandnew it could be that the hd is journaling in background.
this does not take too much time

forge wrote:my gf just got a brang new 1.83 core duo macbook and I loaded up live6 and an old DJ style set I run on my athlon 2200 and whenever I triggered a new clip the audio playback would hesitate slightly

really strange

should eat my laptop for breakfast

it's with a FW-410

but even just when I first loaded it up I'm sure it was with the onboard sound

have to check that again though

This sounds like the exact problem I'm having... a slight delay or dropout when triggering a new clip. I looked for updated drivers for my firewire FA66 (Edirol) but there are only Windows drivers on their site. I have my buffers set at 512. The audio clips are up to 36 measures long at around 120 BPM recorded in stereo with EQ, reverb and compression. If I try to add a track of drums with the EZ Drummer VST plugin, it really chokes and sometimes audio will cut out completely and the only way to recover is a reboot. Let me know if anyone has any ideas.... Thanks for the continued support....

yeah I dont think it has anything to do with the 5400 HD either - I've used even 4200 and not had that happen

blaugruen7 wrote:if the macbook is brandnew it could be that the hd is journaling in background.
this does not take too much time

How do you make sure that journaling is disabled? Is disabling it harmless?

i would not disable it.
if there is NO small blinking point in the magnifying class in the upper right corner, than journaling is not happening at the moment.
just wait some time until there is no blinking point.

Perhaps you could check the new driver in the developers SDK described here:

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

With some luck the dropouts go away,
I can run lower latencies now (128 now, 512 before) without dropouts.
If yes it would proof that something with the core driver is wrong.

kselbee wrote:I have first generation MacBook (DualCore) with 1 gig of RAM and I'm still fairly new to Live, but I'm finding that if I have more that about 3 or 4 audio tracks I start to get stuttering and dropouts and such. Is it just a matter of tweeking my audio settings (I'm using a firewire FA-66) and if so is there a good link on the subject? Should I upgrade to 2 gig of RAM (is it worth the $$$)? Thanks....

More RAM is good, I recently upgraded to 1.25GB and really notice the difference, especially with programs like Battery. As for the audio dropouts, what is the CPU usage at when these occur?