Cutouts in audio for 4-5 seconds OS X powerbook

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Wed Aug 13, 2003 1:18 pm

any body using a desktop machine havng these problems?

jurgis · Post by **jurgis** » Sat Aug 30, 2003 5:23 pm

I have the exact same problem and it's starting to piss me off.

PB g4 1gh
512 ram
RME soundcard and multiface

I've tried everything to make this problem go away and it still haunts me during live gigs. If anything, the stupid program should be reliable (that's essential). Initially I thought that it had something to do with 'funky' aplications, excessive plugins, HD spindown, disk permissions, etc. But after having tried everything, the problem has not gotten better. What's ironic is that after updating to 2.1 the problem actually got WORSE.

I believe that this is the kind of issue that makes or breaks a program, especially one that is designed for live use.

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Sat Aug 30, 2003 6:25 pm

Is it possible either the RME driver or Live's buffer size preference is at fault?

If you go to RMEs website, it seems like their sound card drivers for OS X are still works-in-progress.

Additionally, if you increase the buffer size this can help reduce drop-outs.

-Alex

siwat909 · Post by **siwat909** » Sun Aug 31, 2003 10:47 am

What you've got is a problem in midi/audio in OS10.2.4

Upgrade to 10.2.6 and reinstall any drivers for audio hardware...

The western digital hrd drives also can display power probs when used in external caddies.....some transformers in external boxes can drop voltage as much as 30% meaning the drive can loose some spindle speed and the dropouts are occurring as the drive 'catches up ' with itself... an 8mb cache in drives (like the Glyph Net drives) help overcome this as well as coming with optomised pwer supplies.

I have a 550mhz Ti running 18 tracks of audio over a 1hr 15 min live set, and only experienced one case of drop outs--when the computer got knocked off a flight case by an over zealous monitor engineer (even then only a 2 second drop out and it came back in time and kept running).

plehner · Post by **plehner** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 7:26 pm

I can confirm this behaviour. after a few minutes (10-20) life stops playing audio for about 5 seconds, just like somebody hit the master mute button...

but it does not happen when I pull out the network cable + firewire cable.
I thought of some background task check... update check, or mailcheck....I don't know

regards,
patrick

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Thu Sep 04, 2003 11:56 pm

I dont run mail or system prefs at the same time, but get the same 'drop out'

doing more testing today

IZNODJ · Post by **IZNODJ** » Sat Sep 06, 2003 8:21 am

Titanium 1g, os 10.2.6, Live 2.1.2, Motu 828, Midiman usb 4x4, Reason 2.5 in Rewire

Hi all, just to let you know that I've been having this frustrating behaviour as well and I found out that the clips that went silence for a few seconds were the ones where I've done lots of "transformations" on... I mean moving markers, displacing the downbeat, etc...
So I individually saved them in the sample settings section. So far so good... I do 2 shows a night and tonight I didn't have a problem...
So, dunno, did anybody tried that before?

cheers

IZNODJ · Post by **IZNODJ** » Sat Sep 06, 2003 8:25 am

Sorry,

I forgot to mention that all my files were on an external Firewire drive (Phantoms 7,800 rpm)...

siwat909 · Post by **siwat909** » Sat Sep 06, 2003 8:54 am

here's an interesting one.

Create a new user and desktop specifically for live on you powerbook,

Set up and check all your basic default settings/drivers for software and hardware.

Now run your 'set' , tried this to test out a new external hard drive and got a performance boost of about 15% and NO AUDIO DROPOUTS even on a 17min project with loads of edits and modified files

bemused · Post by **bemused** » Wed Sep 10, 2003 4:20 am

Not to be redundant, but I'm running the newest update of OS X on a 12" powerbook and have experienced the same frustrating drop-outs. I agree that it makes it a little difficult to use live "live" if it's not going to be reliable.

If a remedy is discovered I'd love to know about it.

Anybody out there in Ableton-land listening?

kay101011 · Post by **kay101011** » Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:34 am

i still use 1.5 on osx, i never had this problem!

but one thing really sucks, you can not run live as midi-clock-slave in osx, so i've to use it in os9.2.2.
can somebody tell me if this problem is still present with updating to 2.1??
by the way i allready checked out different usb-midi-interfaces (emagic, midiman).

janklug · Post by **janklug** » Wed Sep 10, 2003 12:05 pm

also in 3...

..not gone, no news..?!

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4657

jan

IZNODJ · Post by **IZNODJ** » Wed Sep 10, 2003 2:06 pm

Sorry guys, I thought I had a glimpse of a solution ( see message above...) but, no, I still had a few drop-outs last night...

plehner · Post by **plehner** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 7:54 am

why isn't there any reaction or comment from ableton to this thread?
Last week I did a live gig and had one dropout for 5 seconds (no audio) - no comment! I died 1000 deaths

please please please fix this - I am not buying the update to version 3 if this bug is still ignored, not solved. (since march 03)

regards,
plehner

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 10:51 am

Could this be a core-audio panic or something???

Is there ANY audio-diagnostic tools, logs etc that we can find.

secondly..has anyone actually seen their 'disk overload' light come on in osx? I know I have never seen it on.

Maybe it doesn't work?

does everybody having this problem have 512mb ram?

could there be a memory leak. ..? I noticed with a memory monitoring program that OSX offloads a fair bit of stuff to ram-disc even when it does not need to. (i'm sure it is for a good reason)

would heaps more ram help?

Ableton, comments?

please?

Cutouts in audio for 4-5 seconds OS X powerbook

powerbook audio 'gaps'

confirm

maybe a clue...

forgot to mention...

audio drop-outs

Add another log to the fire

...also in 3?!

still bugs...

no reaction from ableton?