Cutouts in audio for 4-5 seconds OS X powerbook

siwat909 · Post by **siwat909** » Mon Nov 10, 2003 10:19 am

good news on bug hunt.......
a solution soon will make me a very happy man as about to do european tour in december.

Ruotger Skupin · Post by **Ruotger Skupin** » Tue Nov 11, 2003 8:20 am

Hi People,

while working on this problem, I discovered a workaround. No glitches whatsoever have been found on double-processor macs. So if you have an important gig and you can afford to take a desktop mac with you, do that!

In the meantime, please be patient.

Roddi

guest · Post by **guest** » Tue Nov 11, 2003 10:06 am

How cool thats what I call a workaround

- so I'll definitely have a reason to argue with myself buying a G5 dual for my live gigs - these machines are so lightweight that its an ease to carry them arround

OK,just joking as I dind't have money to get an G5 currently. VERY BIG THANKS to Ruotger and all onthers @ ableton working on the fix for the 'driving us nuts' issue - seems my good old trusted powerbook doesn't have to go to trash that soon

Stefan Haller · Post by **Stefan Haller** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 12:07 pm

It's frustrating. The bug that Roddi was talking about, which the Apple folks helped us track down, is a serious bug and we fixed it; but it seems that it wasn't the one that was responsible for the 5 second drop-out.

Here at Ableton we only have one machine where the problem occurs; it's Christian's PowerBook. He is currently on tour in the USA and can't help us, so we need the help of those of you who are having the problem.

We have built a special version of Live that will write a debug log when the drop-out happens; we hope that this will allow us to see what's going on. The version must be run from the Terminal in order to be able to write the log files; it must be run as root, so you need to do it from an Admin account.

Would those of you who are willing to run this special version please contact me by email, and I will mail you detailed instructions.

Thanks in advance.

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:10 pm

stefan, i'd love to help, but for some reason i haven't had the problem for a few weeks now. if it reoccurs i'll definitely send an email and help out.
thanks for all your work!

andy
scientific

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 7:20 pm

I finally encountered the dropouts as well. (1ghz g4 powerbook, 768 megs of ram, 10.2.6, using built-in audio io). I've been slowly preparing and building up a 45 minute set over the last couple of months and only ran into the dropouts in the last two days. I leave for germany a week from today so I won't be able to run the special version to help in your debugging efforts. The best I can offer is maybe saying what has changed recently in my file. It's strange because for the most part very little has changed lately... I've actually decreased the number of effects (I took out my KT granulators and Live filter delay a few days ago and replaced them with nothing). Mostly my set has just grown in size clip-wise. Other than that, one big change would be that I started using a Live reverb (in economy mode) on one of my sends. It's been in my file the whole time (ie. all these months) but I previously had it disabled. So maybe the reverb is causing problems? Probably a bigger suspect is that I very recently chained a vst effect (mda' combo) to that same reverb... so I have a vst effect and a Live effect on the same send. Could that be a source of problems?

Tonight I'll try moving that vst effect (the mda combo) to it's own fx send... hopefully that will help. Sucks about these dropouts... that won't feel very good on stage! nerve-wracking. I've practiced a 45 minute set plenty of times in the last couple months and had not run into the dropouts until this last weekend. damn... I thought that I was going to squeek by without (too many) problems. It'll suck on stage to have a drop-out, but I can put up with it if I have to! At least Live has helped make it possible for me to be up on stage in the first place!

anyway, hope my observations above help...

I also was experiencing freaky clicking problems but that seems like it might be a problem with my echo Indigo IO card. While running through my set I would start to get these glitches/crackles/static bursts. I could have just one clip playing and it would suddenly and briefly spit static at me, but on a subsequent looping the same stretch of audio would not yield a static burst. frustrating. inconsistent. It sounded like the clicking that you hear if you scrub the buffer size value under preferences. hrrmmmm. I removed the indigo IO card and I don't think I've run into that problem since.

ok...
if anyone has any advice for the above two problems I'd love to hear it.

best,
scotty

p.s. Live is wonderful!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Nov 27, 2003 4:19 pm

just a follow-up from me. seperating those two effects (ie. I created another send track and then moved the reverb to it) didn't fix the problem. Those drop-outs occur now pretty much every time I play my set. I notice that often right before them there is a swelling of volume and I always have this thought like "hey... I'm not doing that...." and then suddenly everything cuts out. hmmm. At least I'm also triggering samples off another computer, so sometimes I'm lucky and the drop-out in Live gets masked by my sample playing from the other machine.

hopefully this will get fixed someday...

my first Live performance is a week (and thousands of miles!) away!

best,
scotty

richardbrown · Post by **richardbrown** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 11:25 am

I just had this happen to me during a gig last week.

iBook G3/700 640Mb RAM
OS 10.2.8
Using internal audio for gigs.

I'd had this happen a couple of times whilst writing on my desktop machine (G4/933) but never before on the iBook. I certainly never had it with any version before 3.

I also noticed that after this happened I quit and relaunched Live and the same set that had freaked out was 3-6db louder.

I had recently installed the following on the iBook to take on tour - Cubase SX2 and 2.1 update, M-Audio Audiophile USB driver (1.5.7f1), Waves 14 day trial, NI Battery FM7 and Kontakt, Waldorf DPole PPG and Attack and some other shareware and freeware VST plugins.

When this happened I had about 30 self-contained Live sets all in one folder (which I choose from File Browser 3). I just play one at a time as I'm mixing with a DJ. I had just got into the habit of moving sets that I'd played into an empty folder so I didn't accidentally play the same one twice.

I wondered if moving the files (although never the file that was currently open) might be causing the problem so for my next gig I stopped doing this and also removed all VST plugins and had no drop-outs - could be luck of course.

Is anybody getting this in v2.1 osx or v3 OS 9 as for my next gig I'm considering either bouncing everthing down and re-importing into V2 or switching to V3 OS9?

richardbrown · Post by **richardbrown** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 11:52 am

Anonymous wrote:Other than that, one big change would be that I started using a Live reverb (in economy mode) on one of my sends. It's been in my file the whole time (ie. all these months) but I previously had it disabled. So maybe the reverb is causing problems?

Just reading back through this thread this rang a bell.....the day of the gig when I got my first dropout I'd written a new track in Live and used the Reverb (in economy mode) for the first time ever. I may be really clutching at straws here but it could be worth looking into....

kleine · Post by **kleine** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 5:55 pm

Hello RichardBrown,

Are there any VST effect´s in your Live set?

Best,
Ch. Kleine

richardbrown · Post by **richardbrown** » Fri Dec 05, 2003 11:17 am

kleine wrote: Are there any VST effect´s in your Live set?

No.

KennyB · Post by **KennyB** » Sat Dec 06, 2003 12:15 am

Has happed to me when playing back ONE 4 minute clip, no plugins anywhere...
Also happened at 11.02am this morning playing back a 9 track arrangement 50 seconds long.

Thank god for OS9.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:53 am

i have a similar problem to one mentioned earlier. cpu spikes up to +600% and a small dropout, maybe a second at longest, but they happen every minute or two. i'm using live 3/osx.2 on an ibook 700. this is definitely not the four or five second drops that the powerbook users are having. this is just usually a half a second of not just dropout, but actual delay. the audio will stop for a split second and ad a fraction of a beat. i seem to remember having cpu spike issue with my other ibook and my old tibook, though i don't think the audio skipped like this.

the process veiwer doesn't show anything consistant with the dropouts, though this may be because it can only sample once a second and these spikes don't last that long. there is some weird thing that may be associated with the spikes, but i can't be sure. it's some strange mix of symbols (including a little apple logo) that flashes up every now and again and the user is displayed as "????".

to (hopefully) rule out the hard drive possibility, it will still happen if i'm running just one clip from ram mode and no fx, and the cpu spikes still happen even if live isn't playing. i have a small suspicion that m-audio drivers may have something to do with this, but i haven't been able to make any real connection yet.

i realize this is probably not abletons fault, i'm just wondering if anyone has found a cure.

k

Stefan Haller · Post by **Stefan Haller** » Mon Feb 09, 2004 9:57 am

Hi all,

it's been a long time, but we were still doing research on the 5-second cutout problem. Now it appears we have some news: on Christian's machine, the cutouts have stopped since he upgraded to QuickTime 6.5 (which installs the CoreAudio version that ships with 10.3, even on 10.2). The Apple folks tell us they changed some timing stuff in the 10.3 version of CoreAudio, so this might explain it.

To verify this, I'd like to get some information from those who are still getting the cutouts, and those that no longer get them: did you upgrade to QuickTime 6.5 (or Mac OS X 10.3), and did the cutouts stop since then? If you didn't, can you please try and see if it helps? QuickTime 6.5 is available via Software Update.

Thanks,
Stefan

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 12:42 pm

Come to think of it, I run Live yesterday, and it didnt do the cutout thing...and i have 6.5 now.

But I did manage to crash live by moving around some clips!! eeek!

Cutouts in audio for 4-5 seconds OS X powerbook

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