All Live/Vista performance problems identified!

aleme · Post by **aleme** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:03 am

maybe you should get in touch with the guys at sonar when you make out that there is a bug in their sw (but before you shout out in other forums). the guys there are coding sequencers since good old dos days. they do it much longer than the ableton guys.

on the other hand i think the guys from the ableton support mostly do their work an a mac. so they realy cannot be winternal professionals. maybe im wrong. but it would seem so to be because they didn´t helped you too much on that subject.

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:27 am

maybe you should get in touch with the guys at sonar when you make out that there is a bug in their sw

I only used the Demo of Sonar to help fixing the RME drivers, I don't plan to do free QA for just another company. If you are using Sonar, feel free to report this. But I will check their site for a contact email adress that doesn't need me to register first.

Whatever, I checked Sonar's MMCSS with all 5 audio-interfaces at hand (RME FF, NI Kore, Creative X-Fi, M-Audio Audiophile 2496) and there seem to be issues with all of them. While the current RME driver and the X-Fi driver switch off MMCSS (back to priority 15) only when accessing Sonar's Audio settings, all others even switch back by simply starting playback.

Interestingly the X-Fi driver is the only one not showing aggressive dynamic priority behavior in Reaper. That means that all other drivers will use a dynamic priority of 15 (with only seldom dropdowns to 14) even when a Normal priority of 8 is manually set in Reaper, while the X-Fi driver will stay around 8 (mostly 9, with peaks upto 13).

Additionally the latest RME driver 2.95 does not seem to save the MMCSS setting over a Windows Restart, but default back to MMCSS being turned on (at least I remember having it set to off before the last reboot, but I will check again).

btw you said that maybe rme did something wrong in choosing the right task (audio / pro audio) in their code. i can´t imgagine that their developers aren´t able to read the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... S.85).aspx

In fact RME did write to Microsoft and seemed to be quite surprised (at least MC) that there is an 8 ms vs 2 ms share with MMCSS, so either they did not read that document until being pointed there or they simply made some mistake (which can happen). Anyway, they're providing quick and effective support now that it has been proven that this is not a sole problem of Live, but can also be reproduced with other DAWs.

i realy don´t understand why you don´t use a running and tested system (xp), especially if your upgrading to a new computer (you should know how fast an old xp system runs on new brand new machines).

I have several reasons, one being that I firmly believe in Vista's superiority over XP.

i disbelieve that you will hardly find users with excellent win system knowledge

I meant Ableton Live users, not Windows users around the world. But even then, I have been dealing with PCs for a long time (and have been coding Assembler once and dipped into C++, so I know about classes and processes and library-functions and bla) and know several guys earning their money in the computer business. When they can't get something to run, they ask me.

Anyway, this thread is not about me being hell of a guy, but about Ableton Live's Vista related bugs and Support failing to solve these and other issues in reasonable time, the later being the reason for my specific demeanor.

aleme · Post by **aleme** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:35 am

keep your good work going! btw out of curiosity: what is your profession or are you a full time musician?

peace!

dom · Post by **dom** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:06 pm

Hi Carriero,

carriero wrote:+ 1
and the "if you don't like our support, we'll give you your money back" response is both immature and unprofessional.

if you quote me, please try to do it correctly: "If you don't like the product" would be the correct one.

carriero wrote: It's the equivalent of "if you don't like it, I'll take my ball and go home."

Also wrong. This would be the case if we would decide to take his license back instead him returning it. And yes, besides being a funny thought that would be immature. ;)

carriero wrote: Just acknowledge the problem and provide us with your insight and assessment.

Guys, take a breath! As i already wrote numerous times: Exactly this is what we do, every day, for years now. And this is also what we do in this case.
I'm very sorry that this takes time but we have to prioritize our tasks. I know first hand how it feels to suffer from a bug and having to wait for a fix or maybe not getting a fix at all, but there's not only Timur, there are tens or hundreds of thousands customers out there. You can imagine that there are bugs out there that had/have to be fixed first, as they were troubling more customers, were more serious and therefore and first of all: are more important for the future of Live as a product in general.
Those decisions are hard decisions for our teams and acting emotional over the top in the forum or even trying to blackmail the support obviously doesn't help but makes things worse, slows them down and poisons the spirit of the whole community.

As i already wrote earlier: When it comes to bugs, quality etc. Timur and me share a lot of views and i bet he is a fun guy to hang out with. But it can't make a difference for me or for ableton's development schedules.
Personally I also have to confess that i'm a bit sad and disappointed by Timur's style in comparison to his skills he claims to have - and would love to see a change there. Most of the time he is acting as if his opinion and his bugs are more important than others. But why should they? Because he is complaining louder and a lot more ballsy than other people?

He often acts as if he decides what bug has to be fixed and what kind of fixes have to be postponed - but i'm afraid this is still completely up to ableton - nobody else can oversee the whole bug situation. ableton as a company is creating a product and is completely free in deciding how to do it.
If there are two bugs, one gets reported by 350 support emails and those people can't work at all and one gets reported by 10 emails and one person constantly screaming in the forum about the same issue, while it isn't even a complete showstopper without workarounds - which one would you fix first?
Remember Timur's own poll asking who else is affected by his issues? You may want to think a second about it.

Timur wrote: You will hardly find any other user out there who comes with so much experience and insight into how Windows PC systems work and my personal experience with Support shows that sometimes I'm better and finding problems and possible workarounds than Ableton themselves.

Statements like this are the ones that are really problematic from my point of view.
First, i really think this sounds totally arrogant and is offending. Not only us, we have to bear with that as part of our job, but also all users in this case. Even more disturbing: Personally I don't think he is in the position to even judge this at all - as long as i didn't miss the cross platform realtime sequencer he developed using his often mentioned assembler skills. And when it even comes to trying to "blackmail" the support i really don't know what is the benefit of such statements, besides flaunting a personal ego.
To be honest, i personally think such a personality is far from a good choice for a support team - but as always: ymmv and it is nothing i have to judge as long as he does not apply for a job over here.

We do a product we care for. You all know we really try to do something outstanding and we came a long way but the world is not perfect and there's no bug free software. What we try is to make Live as reliable as possible for as many customers as possible. And while doing so we try to be as logical an un-emotional as possible - and partly being musicians ourselves doesn't make this more easy. When it comes to technical stuff: try it for yourself!

Ok, as we're repeating the same stuff over and over here are some sentences i will refer to in the future instead of having to join the discussion every time:

Timur: We're always happy about every bug report and therefore also appreciate your reports.
We are working on your issues as well as on all other issues and i can guarantee there will be results for every bug report, regardless who submitted it. I know that it can take longer than it might seem understandable from the outside - but this is not changeable and does not mean we ignore your reports.
In return it would be nice if you could stop imposing your issues over the whole forum and acting that "loud", accusive and offensive about them after reporting. Instead try showing some patience and having some fun in the forum and with Live between the reports while we're working on them.
Report a bug, feel free to drop us a mail about the status after not hearing from us after weeks but stop discussing and whining constantly about how long it does take - it does not speed things up so let's stop this.

Groovy greetings from a sunny Berlin,
Dom

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:03 pm

Dom, before reading your post I wrote another email to support. That email included the solution of the RME troubles with link to RME's (MC) statement to save your Support further effort and troubles with that.

Additionally it includes a list of outstanding issues for which I am not only waiting for a solution, but at least knowledgeable acknowledgement free of accusations.

Furthermore I am kindly asking for an appointment with you (or whomever is leading the support devision) for when I am visiting Berlin next week or the week thereafter. There have been a couple of irritating mails from Ableton representatives that lead to the current situation.

And No, I am not unhappy with the product, but with the quality of your support and how issues (which every piece of complex software on complex systems will suffer from) are handled. If you need months to even acknowledge an issue and unable to help in finding at least workarounds then you cannot blame then either your ticket and priorisation managment is seriously flawed or you are lacking a considerable amount of manpower. Even worse, if you keep telling user/customer to trustingly rely on your support instead of spending their own time and energy into troubleshooting then you actively work towards their frustration.

Last but not least I am still missing any productive contribution to the content of this thread which is about detailed Vista related issue-reports and suggestions how to solve the problems. If you check my original posts at the beginning of this thread you will notice that they mostly deal with content and that only the "Current Status" part (one part out of six, not even a big part at all) mentions Ableton Support plus the added statements by Amaury that draw a picture of how you categorize/priorize Vista problems and how that judgement was wrong in light of my tests on different systems.

Heck, it was even me who finally convinced RME that the 3. Problem was not an issue of Live, but of the RME drivers and who worked hard to get it solved and keep Live users and Support informed about it. That could have happened weeks earlier So maybe my attitude is not that bad after all...

Last but not least you seem to be missing a point when you claim that my issue reports are just a vanishing minority compared to the vast amount of support calls you get. I am reading the forum for quite some time now and helped quite alot of people to get things running properly. There is a vast amount of performance related yet unspecific support calls and there are unspecific glitches happening all over the place. What I am trying to do is pointing to several very specific performance related issues that are reproduceable and at least likely to be connected to a fair deal of unspecified glitches happening.

GUI, MIDI, ASIO, Memory, CPU Overhead, these are various possible culprits to both performance and stability problems. If you think detailed reports about these are low priority then fine, but if that means that this very specific person (me) doesn't get proper support for a whole load of issues at all then something's wrong, and I wonder if that's really just me?!

aleme · Post by **aleme** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:22 pm

this is realy no win-win sitution in here. nevertheless i think you´re alone timur. many users out there don´t wanna be beta testers for a new os. and vista is a new os. from my point of view vista isn´t far superior over xp.

i work on xp. there is no mmcss in xp. but i have no glithes or whatsoever.

now i realy wonder why ms needed to implement this extra multimedia scheduling. it worked in xp if a system was configured properly.

imho it´s all marketing ... as i said before: you´re a victiom of our time

with your investigations you are only showing many people how bad vista is for the moment. so why you couldnn´t wait until all heavy problems are solved.

you for sure know what "kommt zeit, kommt rat" means.

from my point of view vista is a stillbirth. the new windows manager is shitty also, consuming to much memory and so on.

why would one upgrade, especially for a daw?

why did ms expand their support services for xp until 2014?

to clarify: i don´t work for ableton, i also think they follow economical rules to maximize profit. in such a world there is no space for idealism (although mr. henke tries to change the picture)

carriero · Post by **carriero** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:58 pm

aleme,

Not everyone is using Ableton just as a daw or a jukebox. The bands I work with are wanting to use it in live performance with multiple analog instruments and midi instruments playing through it in real time. For this we need lowest possible latencies, lots of plugins, lots of FX, lots of of samples in memory. That means multiple cores, lots of RAM and MMCSS to make sure nothing stomps on anything else. All of that adds up to Vista. That's my reason for making the move. I'm sure there are others.

Nokatus · Post by **Nokatus** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:58 pm

Timur wrote:
Nokatus wrote:How does that come between you and your inspiration in any way, if you have a working XP setup for making music, like you say you do?
What I meant is that it's drawing my attention away from the inspiration.

I get the impression you're persistent when it comes to technical analysis, but a lot less persistent when trying to actually make music.

Timur wrote:
i realy don´t understand why you don´t use a running and tested system (xp), especially if your upgrading to a new computer (you should know how fast an old xp system runs on new brand new machines).
I have several reasons, one being that I firmly believe in Vista's superiority over XP.

Your preference over the Windows version is more important to you than your music. That's just fair. It's still very ironic that you refuse to use a working system which would provide you with music making power that numerous musicians before you would have done anything to get their hands on.

If people had spent months and years waving their hands in the air and exclaiming "I can't make music with this, it's not working like I want it to", when they had to heat their Mellotrons to the correct working temperature with hair dryers, when they had to stand in just the correct spot in a room to get that amp feedback hit a note, when they had to hit-and-miss sync proprietary standard synths to one another... a lot of musicians would have died with a lot of their music still inside them. You have the opportunity to use a system which does shit unheard of just some years ago, and you have "several reasons" not to use it, one being the "technical superiority" of another system. That's BS.

Again, it's genuinely great that you're a persistent techie here to help everybody. At this point, it's just sooo separate from your actual musical activities. It would help your cause a lot to drop the martyrdom. I know, mentioning Mellotrons and stuff is perhaps a long shot from your perspective, but it's you who likes to mention cars and planes in this context, so

...

I remember when you stated that you'll want to make sure your system is totally trouble free before concentrating on making music on it. That was a long time ago, and well, an average life is pretty short. In other words, if you were to declare in the end: "Oh, I would have brought so much more music to the world if only Ableton Live had worked on the system I wanted to use", that would be pretty anticlimactic.

dom · Post by **dom** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:02 pm

Timur wrote:Dom, before reading your post I wrote another email to support. That email included the solution of the RME troubles with link to RME's (MC) statement to save your Support further effort and troubles with that.

Thanks for your mail...

Timur wrote: Additionally it includes a list of outstanding issues for which I am not only waiting for a solution, but at least knowledgeable acknowledgement free of accusations.

... i'm happy to answer it asap, i guess today or tomorrow.

Timur wrote: Furthermore I am kindly asking for an appointment with you (or whomever is leading the support devision) for when I am visiting Berlin next week or the week thereafter. There have been a couple of irritating mails from Ableton representatives that lead to the current situation.

Thanks for asking, but no, sorry, besides me being busy we normally don't offer visits and in this case i also see no point in this or an advantage over written communication. It would also not be the right sign to discuss this behind closed doors, let's keep the topics of public interest here, transparent to the whole community or send us an email if you have more special questions.

Timur wrote: And No, I am not unhappy with the product, but with the quality of your support and how issues (which every piece of complex software on complex systems will suffer from) are handled. If you need months to even acknowledge an issue and unable to help in finding at least workarounds then you cannot blame then either your ticket and priorisation managment is seriously flawed or you are lacking a considerable amount of manpower. Even worse, if you keep telling user/customer to trustingly rely on your support instead of spending their own time and energy into troubleshooting then you actively work towards their frustration.

I understand that you're judging the support quality mainly according to the time-frame your issues are acknowledged and solved, and i'm deeply sorry for your long wait but i won't comment internal scheduling.
Thanks for your understanding.

Timur wrote: Last but not least I am still missing any productive contribution to the content of this thread which is about detailed Vista related issue-reports and suggestions how to solve the problems. If you check my original posts at the beginning of this thread you will notice that they mostly deal with content and that only the "Current Status" part (one part out of six, not even a big part at all) mentions Ableton Support plus the added statements by Amaury that draw a picture of how you categorize/priorize Vista problems and how that judgement was wrong in light of my tests on different systems.

No surprise, i miss it, too.
As i wrote not only once already: As soon as we can offer confirmed and valuable information we will share it. There's no reason we should refuse to do so as soon as we have it, don't you think?
Until then we don't take part in public speculations and half-truths between submitted issues and their confirmation/fix and it would be a nice gesture and less confusing for the community if you would do the same.

Timur wrote: Heck, it was even me who finally convinced RME that the 3. Problem was not an issue of Live, but of the RME drivers and who worked hard to get it solved and keep Live users and Support informed about it. That could have happened weeks earlier So maybe my attitude is not that bad after all... :roll: 8)

I personally don't dig your communication style in some cases, mainly the constant speculations and discussions about who is to blame and what is the cause even before you actually know any concrete facts, like now with the RME issue. But this does not mean at all that i attest you a bad attitude in general, don't understand your situation or even doubt that it would be fun to drink a beer with you.

Timur wrote: Last but not least you seem to be missing a point when you claim that my issue reports are just a vanishing minority compared to the vast amount of support calls you get.

No, i'm not.
Trust me, only reading the forum results in a totally distorted view.
Actually, you're often adding to it :-)

Timur wrote: I am reading the forum for quite some time now and helped quite alot of people to get things running properly. There is a vast amount of performance related yet unspecific support calls and there are unspecific glitches happening all over the place. What I am trying to do is pointing to several very specific performance related issues that are reproduceable and at least likely to be connected to a fair deal of unspecified glitches happening.

GUI, MIDI, ASIO, Memory, CPU Overhead, these are various possible culprits to both performance and stability problems. If you think detailed reports about these are low priority then fine, but if that means that this very specific person (me) doesn't get proper support for a whole load of issues at all then something's wrong, and I wonder if that's really just me?!

And that's where i finally refer to my previous posting...

Dom wrote: Timur: We're always happy about every bug report and therefore also appreciate your reports.
We are working on your issues as well as on all other issues and i can guarantee there will be results for every bug report, regardless who submitted it. I know that it can take longer than it might seem understandable from the outside - but this is not changeable and does not mean we ignore your reports.
In return it would be nice if you could stop imposing your issues over the whole forum and acting that "loud", accusive and offensive about them after reporting. Instead try showing some patience and having some fun in the forum and with Live between the reports while we're working on them.
Report a bug, feel free to drop us a mail about the status after not hearing from us after weeks but stop discussing and whining constantly about how long it does take - it does not speed things up so let's stop this.

Cheers,
Dom

aleme · Post by **aleme** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:08 pm

for sure i have an understanding for realtime cirtical applications. but with an os which was mainly made for office tasks there always will be time critical parts in a setup especially when it comes to cpu sharing. latency will and can never be zero with a computer. in fact every digital audio device has latencies, a pure DAC and/or ADC has latencies too when it comes to processing a signal. you have to live with that, you can´t change physics in practice.

i make music since the days when the first tracker programs came out for commodore computers, and todays architectures are more complex than soemone would expect. one thing affects the other, that´s the disadvantage with complex systems.

and if you want something reliable on stage, it will always be a device that´s only there fpr one task.

dom · Post by **dom** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:23 pm

aleme wrote: i make music since the days when the first tracker programs came out for commodore computers, and todays architectures are more complex than soemone would expect. one thing affects the other, that´s the disadvantage with complex systems.

+1, from tracker to complex.

32°C,
Dom

Nokatus · Post by **Nokatus** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:48 pm

aleme wrote:i make music since the days when the first tracker programs came out for commodore computers

Same here

The rise in complexity (and associated possibilities) just boggles the mind. Live being my main working environment, I still like to step into a tracker once in a while. MilkyTracker is great for that certain oldskool feel, and now that Renoise is so well-matured, you can pretty much have the old and new worlds inside one package when you feel like it.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 5:44 pm

carriero wrote:aleme,

Not everyone is using Ableton just as a daw or a jukebox. The bands I work with are wanting to use it in live performance with multiple analog instruments and midi instruments playing through it in real time. For this we need lowest possible latencies, lots of plugins, lots of FX, lots of of samples in memory. That means multiple cores, lots of RAM and MMCSS to make sure nothing stomps on anything else. All of that adds up to Vista. That's my reason for making the move. I'm sure there are others.

Well considering timurs assertions, it really doesn't seem that it adds up to Vista at all does it? XP uses duel cores just fine right? and there are third party priority scheduling applications out there, so XP can work, and has. Kraftwerk used it live, so can you.
I'm a Mac user, and I'm not saying this because I'm so much less likely to fall for a new OS etc. like many others I jumped into OSX far too early, because it handled MIDI internally, AU, Core Audio, better OS pratection from crashing etc. Sound familiar? I moved back to OS9, and made music.
Problems I had that people were blaming on the software would suddenly get fixed in an OS update, and my feelings after reading this thread are that a lot of Vista's problems are the same, not the developers, but a poor implementation of a promised technical improvement of a incredibly small margin of a monster corporations business.
You doubt me on this, but the comparison to Apple is there, multicore processing in audio for their last 4 core G5 was horrible/non existent until an OS update fixed it. AU documentation would lead to non working plug ins in Apples own Logic, and developers had to code for Logic specifically to support Logic for a while.

TL;DR if Vista is a dog for audio, it's VERY likely that it's not Ableton at fault but Microsoft. (or even more likely that it's a combination of issues with multiple faults spread over all companies involved) Use XP or OSX, and jump on Vista when these problems are solved.

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Fri Jul 04, 2008 11:45 am

TL;DR if Vista is a dog for audio, it's VERY likely that it's not Ableton at fault but Microsoft. (or even more likely that it's a combination of issues with multiple faults spread over all companies involved)

Obviously I need to underline and emphasize again that except for the RME driver issues this is no audio-related problem, but a GUI-drawing related problem! Live's GUI-drawing uses awful lots of CPU load when Aero is deactivated and only by this affects audio-performance. The problem is worst when dynamic GUI elements are turned on (like Mixer level meters or I/O panel) and what's even more strange it's especially bad when Live's window borders overlap with Windows' Taskbar. Turning off all dynamic elements and not overlapping with the Taskbar will result in Live's CPU load dropping down to negible levels just like in XP. But GUI-drawing stays extremly choppy and is little fun to work with (meters are effectively unuseable).

Turning on Aero to workaround these troubles is not a viable option unless Live learns to use MMCSS itself, because Aero's high priority conflicts with Live's audio threads and thus affects Live's audio-performance audibly. The only workaround for this is to turn Live's process priority to Realtime, which will then supersede Aero's priority. The drawback of this is that if Live should ever be overloaded (like when overloading your CPU by duplicating one track too much or putting one effect too much onto a chain) your whole system becomes unresponsive with little chance to correct it without a reset.

You can workaround the performance-hit on audio-playback by either turning Live's process to IDLE and not maximizing Live window border over the Taskbar (or simply disable the Taskbar to always stay in front) or by turning Live's process to Realtime. Changing the process priority will push Live's GUI drawing thread down in priority compared to Live's audio processing threads. By that audio performance is not compromised anymore and Live performs at least as good as on XP with a real chance to even perform better because of several internal improvements like: proper thread processing, disc I/O priorisation, better disc I/O functions, priority managment, real 64-bit (4gb+ RAM) support and much more stable driver/kernel managment.

Use XP or OSX, and jump on Vista when these problems are solved.

If everyone does that then Vista related problems (regardless of wether based on Vista itself, on drivers or on application software) will never be identified, analysed and fixed since obviously developers like Ableton do not spend too much time into QA testing their software on Vista (yet), because they can assume that everyone's staying on XP anyway while bashing Microsoft for problems that in reality are because of applications and drivers being coded wrong. It has to be used in order to grow better. XP has been officialy taken off the market now! By the way, if you consider Vista a "new" OS then you should also consider Live 6 a new DAW, because Vista was released only shortly after Live 6. There are no new updates being published by Ableton for Live 6...

Application development is expensive and proper QA on different OS plattforms even more, so it doesn't make me wonder that issues like these happen. But I can either expect them to be adressed and fixed when a product claims to be compatible to an OS or the company should publish a statement that their software is not fully compatible (like Ableton does with Vista 64) and that no fix can be expected. Like Carriero already stated, we users want to know if it makes sense to wait for a fix in a reasonable time-span, that's days or weeks and not months or years, or if we need to setup our systems all over again to XP because the former compatibility statement was false.

This is a matter of trust and truthfulness of a companies compatibility statements and the company's willingness and ability to adress issues and not of wether one should stay with their "running system" (especially if it became as cluttered as my current XP installation and a fresh installation is long due).

kenporter · Post by **kenporter** » Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:38 pm

Considering that Windows 7 is supposed to come out in 2009 or early 2010, if I were any musical instruments company (I work for one myself) I would not invest a dime in supporting Vista. Vista is a failue of an OS, Microsoft knows about it, and started development on Windows 7 so that it can be released within 3 years instead of the "usual" 5 years.

I work in the music industry and I only know a handful of people who even touch Vista for their music OS. However, I applaud you for being the guinae pig.

I recently read an interview with the CTO of Cakewalk and even he said that nothing much has happened in terms of Vista being better for audio since it came out. Cakewalk is a great supporter of MS OS' so to hear him being rather "disappointed" (or being neutral) about the audio side of Vista left me scratching my head.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/01/1 ... walks-cto/

Ken