breathing makes my set go glitchy

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 3:03 am

hello all
ive emailed ableton support but i need to really do everything possible to help remedy my problem whereby using too many racks makes live go very glitchy, especially when clips launch.

it feels like when things run through racks, especially for the first time, they need to go through the data pipes and 'grease up the wheel' so to speak until the audio/data stream starts to stabilize.

in my case it doesnt stabilize perfectly and continues to glitch.

kineticUk · Post by **kineticUk** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 5:46 pm

I think something is wrong too cause when I tried recording through some racked up devices, the recordings had a glitch (little extra audio appeared before the main recording).
I think this could be related to the "grease up the wheel" thing, or maybe just related (Actually even after grease render to disk always had the error).
Hope ableton look at this anyway.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 1:46 am

seems like Live doesnt like to play catchup.

it seems having stuff also pumping into the sends make the symptoms stronger

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 2:53 am

I wonder if you're hitting some kind of headroom limit to do with Live's "pre-routing" or "buffering" or "prepardness" or whatever you want to call it.

On my old Tibook, I used to be able to have a maximum limit of 110 tracks of clips (only perhaps firing 10-16 at once, CPU meter touching 40-50%). If I added one more track to the set I would get an audible single "click" at the moment any given scene was triggered. Well actually at the moment the scene was selected, not whan the when the clips actually fire on the next bar. (Quantize set to 1 Bar)

This has led me to believe there is some kind of upper limit of "buffer" or "pre-routing/pre-palying" that Live can handle. At the moment the clips are called to be prepared to play, something in Live's arcitecture was being placed under too much load to play a continuous stream of audio.

Like I say, It didn't matter what latency settings were, or how many clips were actually called upon to fire, but exceeding this apparently arbitrary 110 track limit I would get the click.

So I am wondering if there is some sort of internal "buffer limit" somewhere in Live's arcitecture with it's ability to be ready to play clips instantly.

BTW putting clips into RAM etc made no difference.

Ableton have said that track and send routing uses CPU, so I wonder if this impacting on your set.

Sorry for the amateur ramble containg highly made-up terms, I don't know shit about computer programming - just observing symptoms and wondering.....

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 4:05 am

Pitch Black wrote:I wonder if you're hitting some kind of headroom limit to do with Live's "pre-routing" or "buffering" or "prepardness" or whatever you want to call it.

On my old Tibook, I used to be able to have a maximum limit of 110 tracks of clips (only perhaps firing 10-16 at once, CPU meter touching 40-50%). If I added one more track to the set I would get an audible single "click" at the moment any given scene was triggered. Well actually at the moment the scene was selected, not whan the when the clips actually fire on the next bar. (Quantize set to 1 Bar)

This has led me to believe there is some kind of upper limit of "buffer" or "pre-routing/pre-palying" that Live can handle. At the moment the clips are called to be prepared to play, something in Live's arcitecture was being placed under too much load to play a continuous stream of audio.

Like I say, It didn't matter what latency settings were, or how many clips were actually called upon to fire, but exceeding this apparently arbitrary 110 track limit I would get the click.

So I am wondering if there is some sort of internal "buffer limit" somewhere in Live's arcitecture with it's ability to be ready to play clips instantly.

BTW putting clips into RAM etc made no difference.

Ableton have said that track and send routing uses CPU, so I wonder if this impacting on your set.

Sorry for the amateur ramble containg highly made-up terms, I don't know shit about computer programming - just observing symptoms and wondering.....

yeah so far im resorting to the belief that this is some kind of bottleneck in the internal engine.

so far im trying to think of ways of reducing the complexity of my live set yet retain the degree of control i had over my sound...

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 2:19 pm

would anybody at ableton like to comment?

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 4:00 pm

the set was working 'semi' ok, a rare glitch now n then but thats it.. then i removed more channels to relive more duties from live and now i get the horrible glitch when i launch clips.

its not as nasty as my massive cpu spikes of before but it happens all the time now

joesapo · Post by **joesapo** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 11:38 am

I get the same thing when I first use a rack - would like to know what's going on...

southernsteppa · Post by **southernsteppa** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 11:48 am

I think i've been finding this problem also. I'm generally not getting audio glitches, but the redraw of the track levels is particularly noticeable: it seems very jumpy for a while when first playing through a rack.

madlab · Post by **madlab** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 12:39 pm

I also get those occasional glitches on Live 5 the first time that a plug plays : I open a set launch play, when the arrangement reaches the first note for a plug, I get the glitch. I'm sure it already happened with absynth 3 and stylus rmx and will try to note other falty plugs.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:11 am

Guys good news!

Still testing to make sure theres no weirdness, but I think i've managed to get rid of the glitches.

There is a setting in the options.txt to turn off Live's reading of the file cache.

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ions+cache

Once I did that, the glitches got a little better but were still there. So I went ahead and turned off XP's virtual memory altogether. So far I haven't had a single glitch. knock on wood. ill keep testing and let u guys know

peeddrroo · Post by **peeddrroo** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:38 am

sweetjesus wrote:but I think i've managed to get rid of the glitches.

how grateful to the underground support team.

glad it worked.
now go and get married.

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:14 am

peeddrroo wrote:
sweetjesus wrote:but I think i've managed to get rid of the glitches.
how grateful to the underground support team.
glad it worked.
now go and get married.

haha sorry didnt mean to be neglectful, i owe props to pierre although his specific tip didnt work, he lead me down the rabbit hole which lead to the VM being turned off.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:06 pm

What's your HD setup? My page file is set up on a drive separate from my audio data, so does that mean I'm safe?

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:48 pm

longjohns wrote:What's your HD setup? My page file is set up on a drive separate from my audio data, so does that mean I'm safe?

tried that already, i emptied out a 7200 RPM drive and put only that set on there as self contained, same issues.