Ableton Forum

Hi!

I'm not sure if this is one or two or three or four bugs, if they are related or if they're Live bugs or bugs in my UX2 Toneport soundcard's driver... But here goes:

1) Sometimes (often!) when I open a Live set, it crackles and pops a lot, even if it played back fine the last time I opened it. This seems to happen more often when I've just started up Live.

2) When the above happens, it can be resolved by changing ASIO buffer settings back and forth. Like from 128 samples to 256 samples and then back to 128 samples. I usually do this from Live's Audio preferences, Hardware settings. I've just recently discovered this solution, but it seems repeatable.

3) Doing so the other day, I noticed that Live's Audio preferences displayed 512 samples, though I'd only changed the settings from 128 to 256 samples. Also, the crackles and pops prevailed. I opened up the Toneport's dedicated driver settings app and could confirm that it was set to 256 samples. I changed the settings back and forth yet again, from 256 to 128 and back again to 256. Now Ableton displayed the correct value AND the crackles and pops where gone.

4) Though I haven't done any measurements, I'm pretty certain that actual latency (as percieved when I play Ableton or VST instruments from a MIDI controller like a keyboard) sometimes vary - even if I don't change any buffer settings or PDC. It doesn't vary during a single take or even during an entire recording session. Rather, it can vary between recording sessions, so that day one, a setting of 256 samples is perfectly fine for playing my favourite bass sound but day two, that's way too much latency. Now I'm not all too certain about this last "bug" but it seems to me that it could be related to "bug 3".

Anybody recognize this? I'll cross post to Line 6's Tone port forum.

/Jonas

System used:
Laptop with C2D [email protected] GHz, 2 GB Dual channel RAM, 7200 rpm SATA drive, Win XP SP2 fully patched, no unnecessary background processes, power settings at "Always on". Line 6 Toneport UX2 USB soundcard, Novation Remote Zero SL, Korg Legacy w/MS-20ic controller. Live 7.0.1.

I had this problem last night with L7 and my EMu-1616m. I opened an existing live set. The first few bars played back fine and then lots of crackles and distortion.

I then tried Live 6 and Live 5 and had the same problem.

I tried another ASIO based audio app on my Laptop (Audiomulch) and that was fine.

Went back to Live 7 and heard the distortion.

Went into audio preferences and changed the buffer size (I think from 10ms latency to 22ms - can't remember the associated sample size) and everything was fine. Changed the buffer size back to the smaller value (giving me 10ms of latency) and it still worked fine for the whole rest of the night.

This was the first time I've had any problems like this in 3 years of using live 4, 5, 6 and 7 on my 1.8Mhz Centrino based COMPAL C51 Laptop.