Ableton Forum

All of a sudden the output of my Ultralite sounds like one big digital distorted mess, and the meters in its display are jumping all over the place. And now it's happening even while no music at all is playing. A whole bunch of crackles and pops.



what the fucking fuck?!

Any ultralite users here had that problem? HALP!

mine did that once, i either turned it off and on again or did a factory reset, can't remember and it has never happened since....


kind of an obvious solution tho

i turned both the ultralite and my macbook pro for a little while and now it works fine. Weird.

After months of being 100% reliable, i hope this doesnt turn into a frequent problem

I was really looking into that thing for awhile there but this is like the 103rd topic I've seen about this interface having problems with Macbook Pros. I hope it quits bugging out on you.

Just curious, when this happened did you have it plugged directly into the wall or USB power only?

it was plugged to the wall... or should i say, my surge protector. Not bus powered.

somehow related to the problem?

WEIRD! I just had the same issue, and I've never had any problems with my Ultralite.

I had to reinstall the OS on the Ultralite to fix the problem.

aqua_tek: are you using Mac OS X? I am. Perhaps an update to OS X is the problem??? I just don't know.....

yes, osx

I've been running 10.4.9 for a few months now and hadnt had a single problem until last night

It didnt happen again once I turned both the ultralite and the macbook pro off and turned them back on after a while though. So... fingers crossed, lets hope it doesnt happen again

This just started happening to my Ultralite as well. I am on 6.0.10. It doesn't affect my audio, but it makes me nervous. I can't pin down the exact sequence of events that produces this though.

This happened to me with certain sessions on my PC. I just needed to up my buffer to 384 samples and it all went away. Doesn't seem to run as well on lower buffers as my old 1010, but still has a much stable driver.

i dont think its a buffer issue. I've been running it at the same buffer (256 samples) for months without any problems at all. Dont see why all of a sudden it would have anything to do with it, especially since I wasnt even running any intensive projects on Live or any other DAW for that matter. I was just listening to some tunes on someone's MySpace profile

Were you in NY or Puerto Rico? Could be a voltage fluctuation from the wall. The Mac would probably be a little more immune to a voltage sag, but the wall wart for the Ultralite wouldn't be. Hoepfully just a fluke.

aqua_tek wrote:I was just listening to some tunes on someone's MySpace profile

oh, I bet it was a flaky clock going to your box. windows and other OSes probably aren't completely elegant in their interface to audio gear. the chips in your sound card are driven from those clocks, if they change rate too fast or drop out or do something like that they can lock up. all those chips have certain specs to them, things they can and can't tolerate. my bet is the OS burped and locked up the design, no biggie. that code wasn't written by audio people, it was computer people with no understanding of what can happen with audio gear. I wouldn't sweat it.

aqua_tek wrote:i dont think its a buffer issue. I've been running it at the same buffer (256 samples) for months without any problems at all. Dont see why all of a sudden it would have anything to do with it, especially since I wasnt even running any intensive projects on Live or any other DAW for that matter. I was just listening to some tunes on someone's MySpace profile

Did you at least try it? On my computer, I was able to run certain sessions with no crackling at 128, same with 256, but at 384 i'm not experiencing any crackling at all in any session. Even the previously affected sessions.

the only problem i ever had with my ultralite was a dodgy firewire cable that was loose in the port. otherwise it's been rock solid.