Ableton Forum

I am experiencing a crackling problem when recording live guitar through my M-Audio Fast Track Pro audio interface on Ableton Live 6. The crackling initiates when I add effects to my guitar. Prior to adding an effect there are no problems and the clean guitar sound does not distort. The puzzling part of my problem is that if I load Live 6 and add an effect to my guitar, the crackling does not occur immediately, it only begins once I click on another part of Live (like another track etc..) or click on anything else in the program - even as I move my mouse around I can sort of hear the crackling begin. Another oddity to the problem is that once I add an effect to my guitar and click on something in Live 6 initiate the crackling, if I have for example Internet Explorer open and I click on that window, the crackling stops and I can here the effect on my guitar clearly with no problems. Once I click back to the Live 6 screen the crackling immediately starts. I have lowered and raised the latency etc. and it makes literally no difference. I guess I should describe what I mean by crackling - I can hear the guitar fine except there is a crackling-almost like a pulse whenever I hit a note on my guitar. It is not anything to do with my monitors or headphones - I just bought Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro-80 headphones.

Comp Specs:
AMD Athlon 3000mz Dual Processor x64
2GB of Ram
Normal Hardrive - 7200RPM
Fast Track Audio Pro Audio Interface
Using a Strat American Series
Vista 32-Bit OS

I would start by reading up on tuning your system for audio work

For example, IE and Live at the same time = no-no

And with vista you may have to be especially careful with turning off the extraneous features

Thanks man. I will look into that. This is my first attempt at recording so I really do not know what I need to do to setup my computer for audio recording. I was naive to think it would be a plug and play process.