Ableton Forum

I am having a problem that I believe others have had but I have not yet seen a solution. I have been using Absynth 3.02 for about a year now. I just purchased Ableton Live 6.0.5 and am trying to use Absynth inside of Live. While I am playing my keyboard into a Midi track that is controlling Absynth, I get notes that are stuck on pretty often. Trying to troubleshoot this, I decided to begin recording in Live until I heard a stuck note. Examining the Midi "piano roll" revealed that there were no "stuck" notes in the Midi file, but this was something that happened playing the Midi into Absynth. Playing this clip in loop mode would get other notes to stick but not with any regularity. I was able to make this worse by cranking up the tempo to 270 BPM.

Now for the interesting part - there is a great free VST host program called VSTHost that I have been using and have not noticed any stuck notes in Absynth. I even exported the exact Midi clip to a Midi File and then used the Midi Player feature of VSTHost to play that into Absynth, and there were no stuck notes!

I also tried this in Cubase SX2.2 using the same Midi file, and also had notes get stuck on, although not as often as in Live.

The wierd thing is that I also routed the exact same Midi stream simultaneously to Kompakt playing a sampled Piano sound, and when Absynth got a stuck note, Kompakt did not.

Other information: I am currently using my laptop's onboard sound card (Dell Inspiron 6000) using the ASIO4ALL driver. Some people have mentioned that there might be a problem with this setup. Besides, I would like to get better sound quality too, so I am going to head to Guitar Center tomorrow with my laptop and try a USB audio interface to see if the problem goes away.

Does anyone think that ASIO4ALL might be causing the problem? There is alot of activity on the NI Absynth forum about hanging notes - some people have this problem and others do not. Does anyone have a suggestion on which interface to try out? Has anyone successfully used Absynth in Live? Can anyone suggest anything else for me to try? I would really like to use Live for playing "live", but I can't have these stuck notes with Absynth.

I will be posting this to the Ableton, Native Instruments and Cubase forums, hoping someone can give me some advise.

Any ideas are appreciated - and thanks!

I can confirm and subscribe..!!!

I have the same problem with Live 5 !!! .. and not only with Absynth but also with a Vocoder (AKAI).
I stopped for now to use Live when I need the Vocoder..

Any ideas ?!?
Thenx

More info - I purchased a Lexicon Lambda USB interface and uninstalled ASIO4ALL. Played the same sequence - notes still stick.

Moved everything to a different computer (Dimension 8400 running Windows XP Professional) - Played the same Midi sequence still sticks.

So notes stick on two different computers, running two different operating systems using two different audio interfaces.

I have submitted this info to NI along with the Midi file that was causing the problem. I don't know how Live handles processing threads and priorities. VSTHost lets you adjust priorities a bit and that might have something to do with it, but just a guess.

Hopefully someone will be able to reproduce it, and ultimately fix it.

I am having the same problem running Massive in Live 6 (PC AMD 64 2.0 ghz, 2 g ram). I know Massive is CPU hungry but at least I can use its midi kill switch in stand-alone mode. Does anyone know how to set Live 6 for an 'All Note-Off' command? Or how to send an 'All Note-Off' comand from a M-Audio Radium 49? I am using this as part of my on-stage synth rig, and I believe being able to hit a button to solve th problem an workable solution.

I haven't heard any reports of sticking notes with Massive (and I'm the Massive forum moderator).

Are you using the Radium via USB? If so, turn off power management to the USB hubs; Windows turns it on by default, and any USB audio/MIDI device won't like it.

Go into device manager and right click a USB hub to bring up its properties.
Under the power management tab, uncheck anything that's checked. Repeat for each hub and reboot.

See if that fixes it...

ew

I have been using standard midi cables. M-audio's USB driver conflict w/ something in my registy. M-audio has been unable to provide support.

Hmm... and you're using the latest Massive version (1.1.2)?

ew

I can't comment about Massive as I don't have it, but this post reminded me to give an update on my original problem with stuck notes in Absynth 3. I upgraded to Absynth 4 (currently running 4.0.4) and have not had a single stuck note. I now use Ableton Live as my primary host when playing out, and each week the system is very well behaved! So it seemed like NI fixed the problem in the upgrade from V3 to V4.

I am using the latest version of massive. It has not been an issue since a gig about a month ago. I had a note stuck on. I had to turn off the audio engine.