Ableton Forum

You will see my specs at the bottom. I am having drops outs and glitches. My computer is a few years old. By the time I get to 6 tracks of audio, I get glitches in sound and spikes in CPU load meter readings despite having all but one track frozen.

I am serious about the music I am recording now and do not want to monkey around with teh computer I want to simply record like I was able to on my Roland 1680 which never crashed once. Thing is the 1680 does not offer the great options Ableton does and I never had the option of playing midi through it and loading loops.

Is it time to upgrade? I am ready to. I am thinking about a iMac desktop. But I see people comaplining about glitches regardless about wha they are running their program on.

I really want to hear your thoughts.
Thanks.

You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm

Thanks. I will check into them tomorrow. Too tired after recording and dealing with this the past couple of hours.

I also found that I had a number of Mastering and Helper (3) effects on the Master track. Once I reduced them, many glitches stopped.

Are audio effects this draining? I different ones on different tracks and it seems at some number the glitches hit. And I like subtle effects throughout my tracks.

Tarekith wrote:You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm

I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

arkoenig wrote:

Tarekith wrote:You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm

I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

Point taken. In general, though, I have heard of many of the other suggestions before and the computer is responding better so far.

arkoenig wrote:

Tarekith wrote: I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

That guy is talking about DISABLING prefetch

And there's a really important one missing!

Device manager -->> expand Disk drives, right click -->> properties, tab "policies" untick "Enable wrtie caching on disk"

This is a crappy windows caching scheme that can interfere with the buffering that DAWs do specifically for audio. it needs to be OFF.

djsynchro wrote:And there's a really important one missing!

Device manager -->> expand Disk drives, right click -->> properties, tab "policies" untick "Enable wrtie caching on disk"

This is a crappy windows caching scheme that can interfere with the buffering that DAWs do specifically for audio. it needs to be OFF.

Can we get these steps again for XP. They are the only ones I can't follow so far. I'm not seeing the Expand Disk Drives

I know 3 people with Lexicon Omegas and not one of them was able to get it work (2 wouldn't work at all, the 3rd would only work at 1,024 samples).

I don't think the drivers are that great. Try downloading ASIO4ALL and see if that ASIO driver gives you better performance.

All 3 now use other interfaces.

I use asio4all.

Ok, so I am having spikes of 65% cpu usage despite having followed the advice given. I just went back into my boot up and services. I need to shut down Ableton and restart.
I still get sudden drop outs and glitches of no sound.

I may be at fault for dragging and dropping audio effects on the fly to see how they sound. If I have more than two audio effects on a track I run trouble. For example I had vocals doubled, compressor and vocals 2 on a track. I deleted vocals 2 and the song runs fine.

Is this common? Is there a way to remedy it? Freezing tracks does help a great deal. But it still happens.

neyko wrote:
Can we get these steps again for XP. They are the only ones I can't follow so far. I'm not seeing the Expand Disk Drives

I meant device manager, now you see a list of devices, then click on the plus sign od disk drives so it "expands" to show you all the physical hard drives on your system. Right click them and turn write caching off (tab "policies")

Just found out it was set to "on" on my laptop... not good!

re-enable “Show Window Contents While Dragging”.

I leave this off, kinda old school like Atari St but it does take more CPU to blit the contents of a window. thing is with all these tweaks, one of them yes/no is not going to make that much difference, but all of them add up to a few % so do as many as you can stand.

I once solved someone's glitches simply by disabling the Windows disk caching! So that one's worth trying.

This has helped, but Isee that after a certain point compressors (Ableton's virtual ones) are cuasing the glitches. Even if the tracks are frozen.

try with internal sound card using ASIO4ALL driver to see if your external sound card has anything to do with it.

This is happening during playback at random spots during each play back.

Glu, any idea how to do this?