glitchy/buzzing sound when I trigger clips

Wesley · Post by **Wesley** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 9:43 pm

so I'm attempting to dj with ableton. I was unable to find any reference to a file size limit, so I think my set is around 8GB.

I'm using a 1.7Ghz pentium M Asus laptop with a 7200 rpm system drive, a 10k raptor as my audio drive, 1GB of ram, and a NI audio interface.

sometimes when I trigger clips it stalls, hangs or something, makes a loud buzzing noise, then picks back up.

i'm not sure what's causing this. I had this issue when running of just one drive in my laptop, with a 7200 rpm external, now a 10k external eSATA drive. my cpu is not going too high, so I'm completely baffled.

is my project too big? should I set that lookahead feature to ten seconds or something?

I've tried searching the forums and all sorts of different fixes on my own and nothing seems to work. any help is much appreciated,

-wes

Amaury · Post by **Amaury** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 8:25 am

Hi,

You could try increasing the latency of the soundcard, and you could try, at home, the laptop soundcard, to see if there is a problem on this side.

If you can't solve the issue, you should write to [email protected], giving the information asked for on that page:
http://www.ableton.com/pages/support_contact

Regards,
Amaury

forge · Post by **forge** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 9:05 am

Actually Amo - I get this on a very big set as well

I suspect it is related to ram or HD speed

it would be nice to get some detailed specifics from Ableton - like a general guide as to how the computer's resources are used by Live and what will run into the limits of the hardware when

for example: I find Grand piano in EIC almst unusable on my laptop with 1gb ram and 120GB notebook drive (I guess 5400rpm, but I'm not certain)

it would be cool if somewhere there was a general guide of how much ram a set with so many clips of such a size will require

I mean it would need a bit of thinking about the specifics, but rather than the standard "minimum system requirements" you usualyl see on a software box, something a bit more detailed might be really helpful

it might also reduce bug report traffic from people trying to play EIC on a machine with not enough ram or fast enough HD for example

see, in theory from what I understand you should be able to have a really large set and as long as you are not playing all clips at once it should play ok, but I find the bigger the set gets (like more clips in it) then the less stable it is and I get the buzzing and stuttering mentioned here - and it is nothing to do with buffer or CPU - the CPU is hardly used

so if for example there was a guide somewhere that said "10 clips of 1 bar at 24bit will use xx RAM" on average and a sampler instrument with x voices and x samples will on average use x ram and bottleneck the hard drive with x voices - you get what I mean?

this could be something Live users could work out (like Adam Jay's performance tests) but we need a little more info in the beginning of how much ram is used under the hood for certain processes

just a thought - but I have been finding this to be a problem when attempting to use EIC at least

I dont have any problems with CPU related tasks like soft synths

Wesley · Post by **Wesley** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 8:27 pm

well the clips in question are usually 4-8 minutes each.

i'm basically asking Live to play back no more than 4 tracks at once, however each track is about 100 Megs.

I suppose I'm going to investigate my sound card settings, increase the look ahead error thing, perhaps remove some of the older clips I don't use that often. thing is, what if I wanna do a 4 hour set, that means I need at least 60 songs, at 100 MB a pop that's a 6 GB file.

thanks for the replies,

-wes

forge · Post by **forge** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 11:57 pm

Wesley wrote:well the clips in question are usually 4-8 minutes each.

i'm basically asking Live to play back no more than 4 tracks at once, however each track is about 100 Megs.

I suppose I'm going to investigate my sound card settings, increase the look ahead error thing, perhaps remove some of the older clips I don't use that often. thing is, what if I wanna do a 4 hour set, that means I need at least 60 songs, at 100 MB a pop that's a 6 GB file.

thanks for the replies,

-wes

oh - yeah you should be ok with a set like that - I'm talking about a huge saet with about 1000 clips in it

Lateral · Post by **Lateral** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 10:54 am

Maybe you should try to turn off page file (virtual memory).

forge · Post by **forge** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 11:24 am

Lateral wrote:Maybe you should try to turn off page file (virtual memory).

you think that will help?

how?

If I dont have alot of ram by vista standards wouldnt that make it worse?

StevieLevy · Post by **StevieLevy** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 9:52 pm

You may need more ram if you're using Vista.