Ableton Forum

We've had this problem for a while now, but never on stage until last night. Basically Live suddenly drops the midi sync and brings up an error to the effect of "Live has lost MIDI sync etc. press OK". The set keeps playing, but completely out of sync.

I've tweaked XP according to various guides on the net, stopped all unused services, no other programs installed other than drivers, Ableton, VST's and other audio/midi apps (no cracks). Ableton is running by itself when this happens. The computer running it all is:

Athlon 3800 X 2
1.5 gig DDR2 RAM
E-mu 1820m soundcard running latest drivers
Midisport 2x2 midi interface <---- sync runs into one of the ports here

We run a bit of midi into the E-mu's 2 midi ins for clip triggering and sample playback using the ShortCircuit VSTi. The set file itself is pretty big with about 300megs of audio clips and a bunch of FX. CPU never goes above 40-50% though. All clips are on RAM mode, and when the set is fully running there's still about half a gig of RAM free.

We've got a show next Saturday supporting quite a big name and the last thing we need is another trainwreck.... What can we do??

I had a similar problem between two Macs until I dedicated one MIDI port to sync, and the other port to the rest of the MIDI.

It's worked perfectly ever since.

Thanks for replying hambone. Unfortunately I've already dedicated 1 port of the midisport interface to sync, so that's a no go.

I should mention that I'm using an MPC2000xl as the sync source which has never dropped out when using it to sync to Cubase.

Well I emailed Ableton support and got no response

Anyway, I think we may have fixed it, hasn't dropped out so far. We've basically dedicated the whole midisport 2x2 for the sync and all the other midi runs through the e-mu's ports. Apparently the midisport's (bar the 8x8) have one buffer for all ports, instead of seperate buffers for each one. So the midi from the mpc going into one port, as well as the sync signal going into another was probably causing the dropout.

In short, dedicate a whole interface to your sync if you have problems and you should be right.

We also upgraded our cpu and added another 2gig of ram Hey, ram's cheap at the moment!