Ableton Forum

I just opened a project I haven't touched for about a month. I was giving the
track a listen from start to end, just to get into it again, and was greeted
with an awful, high-pitched sine wave noise when I reached a certain point in
the timeline. I soloed the tracks one by one, and quickly narrowed the noise
down to a select few tracks. They all had either one of the guitar effects racks
(with several EQ Threes inside) or just an EQ Three. I switched off the effects,
one by one, to find the source, and it didn't take me long to narrow it down to
EQ Three. The input indicators next to the effects were lit - all the way to the
top.
Wow - that was quite a choir, when - I don't know - nine EQ Threes
started "singing" at the same time. The ringing is still in my ears! Has anyone
else experienced this?

Oh, by the way: If I had been on headphones at the time - I'd probably be
fucking deaf by now! This is a rather serious issue!

Version: Live 6.09

I have the same problem as sporkles. This has happened to me with two of my live sets so far, just happened 10 minutes ago and my ears feel like they're about to fall off. This is a really nasty bug, my ears are also still ringing!

I'm running Live 6.10 on bootcamp with Windows XP. I have tried opening the project on earlier versions of Live as well as on OSX but the problem is still there. If you turn off the eq three and back on the noise disappears, but it comes back after a while. I tried deleting the EQ three and replacing it again, but the problems still exists. I found the only soulution is to use eq eight or something else in those songs. I have many other sets that use eq three that have no problem, so I really don't know what is causing the problem.

Anybody else experienced this?

Bump!

OK - now that we're two who have experienced this, we are a small crowd. Can
anyone shed some light on this?

I have not experienced the kind of noise you describe, but recently I had a project that suddenly stopped producing sound in a manner similar to a overload shutdown or a denormalisation bug. Trying to track down the source of misbehavior by deactivating one plugin after another, to my surprise it turned out that it wasn't any 3rd party plugin but EQ Three (several of them on several tracks) that caused the problem.
So far, it happened only on that day and on that project (but was reproducable), yet that's been just a few days ago.
If I remember correctly, what it also had in common with the problem you describe is that it always happened at a certain point in the timeline, but definitely EQ Three was the source. I assume a bug introduced with 6.0.10, since it never happened before.

I have emailed Ableton support about this, and also sent them a live set with the problem and some of the info about how to recreate it.. I got a reply back that they reproduced the bug and they're hoping to fix it in a future update ; )

I have found out that a these 4 factors have to be present for the bug to appear on my system:


1. two or more eq three’s are used in the live set
2. the eq’s have different filter settings, i.e. one is 24 the other 48 db
3. Multicore/multiprocessor support in turned on in preferences
4. the clips feeding the eq’s start at the same time in the arrangement

The bug happens in Windows XP and OSX Tiger 10.4 on my MacBook Pro in Live 6.10. The problem is also there in earlier versions of Live 6. I tried to recreate the bug on my Windows Xp P4 machine, but the problem wasn’t there, that’s how I found out that it must be a problem related to Multicore/multiprocessor machines.

I had a friend open the set with the bug, and on his machine the noise didn't happen, but his cpu went to about 200% when the clips fed the eq's.

Anyways, the Ableton people know about the problem hopefully it will be fixed soon.

First of all, hello to everyone here, hope you will welcome me.

I'm new to Ableton and just bought brand new Live 6 a couple of days ago, and almost immediately experienced the same distortion problems with EQ Three. I also could not get rid of the flanger effect even when I disabled it and tried 'covering it over' with other effects and also even when I deleted/cut and pasted on a fresh song over the top.

What really worked for me was to just insert a new audio/midi track and put in the required song samples and then delete the faulty song & mute the audio/midi track it was on, to make sure that the old problems don't creep back into your live set. Stay away from flanger, EQ Three and maybe the rest of the effects. Import effects from an external keyboard or sound pad instead.

alivia wrote: What really worked for me was to just insert a new audio/midi track and put in the required song samples and then delete the faulty song & mute the audio/midi track it was on, to make sure that the old problems don't creep back into your live set. Stay away from flanger, EQ Three and maybe the rest of the effects. Import effects from an external keyboard or sound pad instead.

I've used Flanger, EQ3 and the rest of the effects just fine. I did once get that weird EQ3 ghost tone, but that was an exception and definitely not "distortion".

I suspect your problems with effects are user error-- you did just buy the program, I'm not trying to be a jerkoff. Do you have two tracks playing the same audio? That'd cause a flange-like sound that wouldn't respond to the diabling of a flanger plugin.
Or maybe you have some wacky Warp settings, I think some of the beat-mode pitch stretches sound a bit "flanged" too.

You can create distortion with EQ3 if you boost it too much. Try using EQs to cut bad frequencies more than boost good ones and you'll avoid "distortion".

I'm not sure what you mean by "importing effects from an external keyboard"?. Most people here use the word "effects" to mean the plugins that modify audio inside Live the way a guitar stomp pedal would modify sound coming out of a guitar. Most external keyboards do not have audio inputs that would allow them to accept sound from Live, but maybe you have some cool keyboards in your setup?

This has been fixed in Live 7 beta: http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=77406