Clip changing causes stuttering

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djshiva
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Post by djshiva » Sun May 21, 2006 7:42 am

had this very problem with a dj set last night. i have done similar sets twice, with only one minor glitch. tonight, however, it was a mess of glitches, stuttering and crazy noises. frustrating...

my cpu meter was showing LESS THAN 10% the whole time, but i was getting the disk overload light on every time it glitched.

ugh...it was a mess...
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Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo / OSX / 2Gb RAM / Ableton Live 8 / Akai LPD8/LPK25

Amaury
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Post by Amaury » Sun May 21, 2006 1:48 pm

Hi DjShiva,

Did you perform with the PC listed in your signature ? Because, same as Borg, I think there is a memory swaping issue. 512 Mo is the very minimum required for Live to run, and Windows XP already eats up quite a lot.

If you can reproduce that at home, please check the task manager to see about the RAM usage.

Hope you next gig will be trouble free.
Kind regards,

Amaury
Ableton Product Team

djshiva
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Post by djshiva » Sun May 21, 2006 7:56 pm

well, i had practiced the same set at home (on the centrino laptop)with no problems at all. when i got to the venue, i set everything up, and the one element that is different from the last few sets is that i turned the puter on, opened the set in ableton,and let it sit for a bit before i played. now i am hearing that other users have suffered instability when they leave ableton running for a while and come back to it.

i did not have glitches like this at home AT ALL.
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Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo / OSX / 2Gb RAM / Ableton Live 8 / Akai LPD8/LPK25

borg nagar
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Post by borg nagar » Wed Nov 15, 2006 9:06 pm

Amaury wrote:Hi Borg,

What does the Task manager reads when Live is playing your set ? In the RAM usage section.
That could sound like a memory swaping issue too, like Windows has to swap memory to the hard drive and the hard drive can't cope with that.
Helllo Amaury,

The Mem Usage shows 204 520 K for Live and 338M as Commit Charge. CPU Usage is at 10-25 when playing constant loops on almost every channel. The CPU rarely goes over 30%.

I have noticed that I have to "teach" the clips to live before playing. I set the clip quantization to 1/32 and go through every clip so many times that they don't start the stuttering anymore. Also it helps if I warm up the machine with CPU Burn in -software. I'm sure it would help to have fast harddrive and a lot of memory, but I cannot afford to buy computers all the time.

:edit: But I did get a new seagate barracuda 7200.10 and I'm using it as external hd through USB2 port. Stuttering still exists.

Once again, I have a show to play tomorrow and I'm going really desperate now. This setup worked fine earlier, and there should't be any changes.

borg nagar
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Post by borg nagar » Fri Nov 17, 2006 9:16 pm

I'm going to delete all the .asd files again and try to work around the problem from there. If anyone has any ideas, I would be glad to try them out.

:edit:

That didn't help. If possible it only got worse.

Now defragmenting harddrives.

longjohns
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Post by longjohns » Sat Nov 18, 2006 2:08 am

borg nagar wrote: Also it helps if I warm up the machine with CPU Burn in -software.
this just doesn't make sense to me. is there some cpu throttling happening?

djshiva
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Post by djshiva » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:03 pm

two things helped me with this problem:

1) more RAM. i stuffed my lappy with 1GIG (all it could take), and things got decidedly better.

and

2) a friend of mine told me to go to device mangler into the battery setting and DISABLE the ACPI thingie (technical terminology, I know...but there should only be one setting in that menu for this). it's the little thing that checks the charge of the battery intermittently.

now i trusted my friend, but was still a tad skeptical, until last night. i had turned the ACPI thing back on when i was using my lappy on the bus the other night (turning it off means you will NOT see the baterry power indicator in your taskbar). at a gig last night, i was having stutters and intermittent dropouts, and even though i only was using about 9% CPU, i kept getting CPU spikes with the dropouts. i was scratching my head and t hen realized i had never disabled the ACPI setting since i had turned it back on.

so mid-set, i go and disable it, and VOILA! no more dropouts or stutters.

seriously...try this.

and get more RAM. it's worth it.

hope this helps!
http://www.soundcloud.com/djshiva
http://www.facebook.com/djshivamusic
http://sapphicbeats.blogspot.com

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo / OSX / 2Gb RAM / Ableton Live 8 / Akai LPD8/LPK25

tonyrohr
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this is crazy...

Post by tonyrohr » Tue Nov 21, 2006 2:44 pm

a buddy of mine with a relatively brand new laptop was experiencing the same thing. audio dropout, clipping, etc...

i tried to do the quick solutions that i knew of:
- defrag
- delete temp files from ableton cache & local user\temp
- remove items from starting in system tray

but it still happened. especially after a few minutes.
then... THEN it started happening to my laptop later on that week. same sh*t!
i shut down all kinds of services and whatnot and it still "kind of" happens now.

ableton used to run FINE with loads of files and plugs on my laptop.

not to sound paranoid, but this is beyond odd.
- maybe an ableton code freakout?
- a new *gulp* virus???
- new patch/feature from microsoft that interferes with the ableton live code?

for reference i'm running:
ableton 5.2 & windows XP sp2 (+all recent patches)
m-audio delta 410 fw

i can provide more info if needed.

djshiva
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Re: this is crazy...

Post by djshiva » Tue Nov 21, 2006 5:03 pm

tonyrohr wrote:a buddy of mine with a relatively brand new laptop was experiencing the same thing. audio dropout, clipping, etc...

i tried to do the quick solutions that i knew of:
- defrag
- delete temp files from ableton cache & local user\temp
- remove items from starting in system tray

but it still happened. especially after a few minutes.
then... THEN it started happening to my laptop later on that week. same sh*t!
i shut down all kinds of services and whatnot and it still "kind of" happens now.

ableton used to run FINE with loads of files and plugs on my laptop.

not to sound paranoid, but this is beyond odd.
- maybe an ableton code freakout?
- a new *gulp* virus???
- new patch/feature from microsoft that interferes with the ableton live code?

for reference i'm running:
ableton 5.2 & windows XP sp2 (+all recent patches)
m-audio delta 410 fw

i can provide more info if needed.
seriously, try turning off that ACPI setting in the device mangler. it REALLY made a difference for me.

i also realized (very quickly) that if anything is warped in complex mode, it is a BITCH on CPU.

i was only running one damn clip or changing clips when it happened to me, so it threw me off big time!

btw...didn't you used to live in indianapolis WAAAAAY back in the day?
http://www.soundcloud.com/djshiva
http://www.facebook.com/djshivamusic
http://sapphicbeats.blogspot.com

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo / OSX / 2Gb RAM / Ableton Live 8 / Akai LPD8/LPK25

tonyrohr
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Re: this is crazy...

Post by tonyrohr » Tue Nov 21, 2006 5:41 pm

djshiva wrote: seriously, try turning off that ACPI setting in the device mangler. it REALLY made a difference for me.

i also realized (very quickly) that if anything is warped in complex mode, it is a BITCH on CPU.

i was only running one damn clip or changing clips when it happened to me, so it threw me off big time!

btw...didn't you used to live in indianapolis WAAAAAY back in the day?
i'll try it, but why is this happening now? it's very odd.
i really haven't made that many changes. definately not any that should affect my lappy's performance like this.

i used to play a lot in indy, but i lived in illinois...

borg nagar
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Post by borg nagar » Thu Sep 27, 2007 11:01 pm

Has anyone found a solution for this? Somehow it seems that you need to "teach" the clips to live for some reason. Because clips that you have played more work better and with less stuttering. I think that is really weird.

I just switched to brand new macbook with 2G ram and now it's happening there too while my old tabletop pc ran the same liveset without problems. It does the same with the integrated apple soundcard and with my m-audio audiophile FW.

I have to set latency to about 85ms to get slightly more stability. I wish I could set it higher than 2048 samples... I must be the only one wishing for more latency :D

Here are some solutions, that improve it a bit:
-delete all .asd files and let live rebuild them
-create a new liveset and import the one you want to load instead of loading it like you normally do
-play the clips a lot, leave them playing (now i set quantize to 8 bars and put the enter key down with a microphone.. the clips you play more seem to have less problems starting) [this sounds like fragmentation or something to me]

Anything else?

Bunky Freaks
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possible solution for stutter mania on live 6/windows

Post by Bunky Freaks » Sun Oct 07, 2007 6:13 pm

Hithere,

as it seems a lot of people suffered from what I experienced with a live set which contained a lot of scenes and samples (<3 gb):
the demonic stuttering while changing scenes or launching clips. It happed to me in Live 6, but may also apply to Live 5.

For Live 6 on Windows I got rid of the problem by using an alternative caching scheme.
It can be activated using the command line "-UseFileSystemCacheForReading=Off" in options.txt.

In Live 5 there is a menu item "system file cache" in "preferences/audio/settings" to toggle it on and off, which I suspect does the same.
It may improve performance but I did not test it for Live 5.

It helped two of my laptops (running Live 6) to playback the same set which was a big mess before and made me pulling my hair out.
Now both of the machines (one with 768mb, the other with 1000mb RAM) run the set without any hick ups, glitches or stuttering.

It would be great to hear from you if it helped to make your sets playable again,
since I am not 100% sure if it is the definitive fix for this specific problem. I am sure the abletons are also interested in this.

DISCLAIMER: I have no idea what this switch exactly does, but I had no single problem whatsoever.
But anyways use with care and on your own risk!

I found this tweak in this threat, it was made public by ableton officials:

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=54723

cheers,
Phil

timothyallan
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Post by timothyallan » Thu Oct 18, 2007 7:17 am

I'll be trying this tonight, hopefully it helps with the glitches I get while triggering clips in my Live set... 3.1gb :)

adventurepants_
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Post by adventurepants_ » Sat Oct 20, 2007 7:35 am

check what brand of Firewire chipset you have.

There are lots of problems with non TI chipsets. Ricoh especially has a lot of problems. This one issue has the exact same symptoms you are referring to.

timothyallan
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Post by timothyallan » Sat Oct 20, 2007 7:42 am

TI chipset in a macbook pro running bootcamp :(

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