Ableton Live 10 buffering / glitching

[TheBro]

1 minute ago, thawkins said:

This website (WATMM) is absolutely terrible though. I don't know what the hell it is doing but on my old laptop it was lagging so hard. Today's internet is completely messed up, even text based websites now require insane amounts of processing power.

Bizarre mate. Do you have a full Ableton Live license by the way?

[hijexx]

Unpopular opinion: I wouldn't run any additional anti-virus software aside from what comes built in with Windows.

[TheBro]

1 minute ago, hijexx said:

Unpopular opinion: I wouldn't run any additional anti-virus software aside from what comes built in with Windows.

Yeah that would be lol. Malware Bytes was actually recommended to me by a colleague and so far it has kept my computer from shite getting in.

[thawkins]

3 minutes ago, TheBro said:

Bizarre mate. Do you have a full Ableton Live license by the way?

Yeah I bought it a while back when it was on sale. 

[TheBro]

Just now, thawkins said:

Yeah I bought it a while back when it was on sale. 

Awesome. Yeah its on sale at the moment but I just don't have the money. Shame. 

[thawkins]

Just now, TheBro said:

Yeah that would be lol. Malware Bytes was actually recommended to me by a colleague and so far it has kept my computer from shite getting in.

It's not bad but you can keep it off when you're making beats temporarily. Just don't go on weird websites when producing - problem solved.

 

By the way you should still do the test - get a busy section of your track/project looping in Live, and then switch off your plugins to see if there is one particular VST that slows everything down.

[TheBro]

1 minute ago, thawkins said:

It's not bad but you can keep it off when you're making beats temporarily. Just don't go on weird websites when producing - problem solved.

 

By the way you should still do the test - get a busy section of your track/project looping in Live, and then switch off your plugins to see if there is one particular VST that slows everything down.

Well I did notice that Blue Arp seems to be quite a hungry vst but it just like an Arpeggiator lol.

[thawkins]

14 minutes ago, TheBro said:

Well I did notice that Blue Arp seems to be quite a hungry vst but it just like an Arpeggiator lol.

Hmm I need to check this thing out too actually. Just to see if it is as power hungry as you say it is of course. 

[TheBro]

39 minutes ago, thawkins said:

Hmm I need to check this thing out too actually. Just to see if it is as power hungry as you say it is of course. 

Its a great Arp. Be a real shame if I can't use it.

[user]

I’d still try to go through these steps if you haven’t already:

Take your computer offline

Shut down malware bytes and any other applications that you don’t need to be running when you’re using live. 

Open an empty live set and add each vst one by one. Have a little play around after adding each one. 
 

Try to work systematically so you can eliminate possible causes. Personally I’d fire up live between each step to see if what you’ve just done made any difference. Don’t change any settings anywhere in between or you’ll lose track.

Other things to consider; maybe there’s a conflict between your audio interface and another usb device?

Have you checked yet if other audio apps run ok on your computer? Maybe try running a beefy softsynth in standalone. 

[thawkins]

Check this out: I have 1 audio track in my project. The rest is MIDI. IF---

(I can't believe my macbook just crashed and rebooted while I literally turned my back to it once!)

Aaanyhow. I have 1 audio track in my project, some 40 MIDI tracks. Just loading it and arming the audio track bumps Live's CPU meter from 6-7 to 20%. And it's just a couple of EQ8, a flanger and a compressor. When I turn on my 3 send busses I got around 25% on the meter.

I don't think this is normal although maybe I am just not good at this stuff.

[Squee]

8 hours ago, TheBro said:

TAL-U-No-62, Tal-Dub-3, Blue Arp, Drumrack, MPhaser, TAL Noisemaker x 2 - that's really it.

Those plugins are fairly easy on your cpu as far as I remember.

Have you tried creating a new project and load up the same exact plugins to see if the same thing happens? If it doesn’t then your project might simply be corrupt. I’ve had that happen before in logic. 

[TheBro]

On 5/25/2020 at 11:39 PM, Squee said:

Those plugins are fairly easy on your cpu as far as I remember.

Have you tried creating a new project and load up the same exact plugins to see if the same thing happens? If it doesn’t then your project might simply be corrupt. I’ve had that happen before in logic. 

That could be it. Could be corrupt. I've loaded something up which is using more vsts etc and its fine so far its seems.

[thawkins]

6 hours ago, Mesh Gear Fox said:

no you are defs on the right track! i remember finding that thread a while ago when googling. i get that the % in task manager is different to the % in live, but Live simply used to run better. and i keep finding this "windows audio" thing in task manager that is constantly chewing a high % of cpu.

ok so firstly edge sucks and you should switch to firefox or chrome. both are equally bad in terms of memory management though (remember when chrome was 'lightweight'?). i also had a problem where windows defender was using 400+mb of memory but thankfully found some setting hack that seems to have fixed it, now it stays around 200mb. what did you say your audio settings were again? in terms of buffer size and all that.

Personally, the life hack is to run Firefox with Ublock Origin or Adnauseam to kill off the ads and crap. Chrome sucks because it is Google spying on you, unfortunately that is an increasing trend. If you are feeling like you want to be an expert hacker user, get the NoScript extension which will kill all scripts on every website - this makes things very safe and fast, but you will spend a lot of time manually re-enabling some scripts to make websites work again (while leaving the bad shit blocked).

As for processes taking a lot of memory, actually this is not such a big thing nowadays. Basically my impression is that now when most computers have quite a lot of RAM, applications can keep more temporary data directly in memory (instead of swap file or pagefile). This means that it looks like they are taking ridiculous amounts of memory but the actual essential part is just a fraction. When the operating system detects that memory is tight, it will force apps to clean some of that temporary data (by writing to disk for example). That's why MacOS is showing a "memory pressure" graph - it is more helpful to show if there are many applications asking for memory, rather than display that all memory is allocated for what is mostly temporary data. 

Basically the idea is to keep utilization percentage of RAM as high as possible at all times, which makes apps faster and results in a better user experience. 

BACK TO THE SUBJECT AT HAND...+++++....''222222

One theory I have for Live 10 is that the new Capture feature is messing with things (https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000776450-Capture-MIDI). Like even if you are just messing around and not recording yet, Live is still doing something. It should not be a big issue though because "it's just MIDI". But hey, my fans spin up when loading my default template project so it's either my project that is too huge (probably true), or something else is fucky.

Going to try out some things today to see if I can slim down my piece of junk project.

[Squee]

7 hours ago, TheBro said:

That could be it. Could be corrupt. I've loaded something up which is using more vsts etc and its fine so far its seems.

Alright, try exporting all the midi tracks and stems and recreate the track in a new project. It should work

[mcbpete]

10 hours ago, Mesh Gear Fox said:

ok so firstly edge sucks and you should switch to firefox or chrome.

Going in a complete tangent - With the new builds of Edge there's basically nothing between Chrome and Edge other than the icon and name. The code base/rendering engine is pretty much identical now Edge has migrated to Chromium...

[rev85]

Try using ASIO4ALL http://www.asio4all.org/

Switch over to that in your Ableton preferences. Hopefully that may make a difference - worth a shot.

[thawkins]

Bumping this thread as I have been trying to figure out what the hell is up with my setup for what seems to be months now. In the last few days it has gotten to the point where I can't record a 2 minute clip in Live without this popping up.

What is this sound at the 5 second mark?

I know where in my hardware chain it happens: I have a MOTU Track16 hooked optically up to a M-Audio Profire 2626. The latter is getting the audio signal from my hardware, and a few weeks back I did a test where I recorded the audio on my old laptop directly hooked into the Profire over FW, while the MIDI was sent from my main laptop, where I also could monitor if any glitchy sound came in through the MOTU interface. And when it eventually showed up, I checked the recordings on the old laptop, and there was nothing.

My working hypothesis is that something about the software configuration of my laptop is causing this or it can be that the optical cables' different length messes something up in the synchronization (doubt it). I could never replicate this on my 10 year old laptop (both are macbooks pro) though, so I think something is up with my main laptop.

Just putting this here in case this rings a bell for someone.

[user]

Couple more things I’d add to the troubleshoot/elimination process if you haven’t already;

try the motu interface on your other laptop 

swap out the motu’s usb cable for a new/different one

try a different usb port

is the motu on a dedicated port?

does this also happen when using other recording software? 

Oh, just realised you have the motu hooked up via adat, so that means you have the m audio connected via fw to your laptop, right? What happens when you switch them around? 

Didn’t read back through the rest of the thread so possibly there are somethings that were already answered. 
 

Intuitively I’d say there’s some clocking issue/jitter going on between the two interfaces but you already alluded to that. The noise sounds kind of zippery to me and not like typical buffer popping/glitching. 
 

Is one of the interfaces switching samplerate maybe? Like it’s set to 44.1 in some program that then tries to set it to that samplerate before the interface quickly switches back to it’s configured setting of 48khz? 

[thawkins]

6 hours ago, user said:

Couple more things I’d add to the troubleshoot/elimination process if you haven’t already;

try the motu interface on your other laptop 

swap out the motu’s usb cable for a new/different one

try a different usb port

is the motu on a dedicated port?

does this also happen when using other recording software? 

Oh, just realised you have the motu hooked up via adat, so that means you have the m audio connected via fw to your laptop, right? What happens when you switch them around? 

Didn’t read back through the rest of the thread so possibly there are somethings that were already answered. 
 

Intuitively I’d say there’s some clocking issue/jitter going on between the two interfaces but you already alluded to that. The noise sounds kind of zippery to me and not like typical buffer popping/glitching. 
 

Is one of the interfaces switching samplerate maybe? Like it’s set to 44.1 in some program that then tries to set it to that samplerate before the interface quickly switches back to it’s configured setting of 48khz? 

Cheers, thanks for those tips. Let me go through one by one.

• I have tried the MOTU on my other laptop. Just yesterday I put Live 10 on it and loaded up the same project that was giving me the glitches, and nothing like this happened. There were some substantial differences though - I did not have some of my M4L devices (a modded ControlChange8 and NoteModulator), one of my synths was not hooked up over USB and also I was missing the IK ARC EQ correction VST. This makes me think that maybe M4L is doing some fuckery here.
• Haven't swapped the USB cable. Maybe I should give it a shot, but I have had the MOTU for years now without issue and it is only recently I have the glitches show up.
• MOTU used to be on a shared port but now I got it on a dedicated one. No significant difference it seems.
• I use mainly Live, but occasionally I load stuff into Reaper too.
• MOTU is connected to the laptop over USB (I have a newer MBP without firewire unfortunately), and the Profire is hooked up over ADAT. My old lappy has FW so I could "intercept" and record directly from the Profire too.

I think it is indeed something to do with sample rates. I used to be all on 44.1kHz and I changed that around to 48kHz recently hoping to get rid of the glitches. No change there. I wonder if something is changing my sample rate, what the hell is it? I can totally believe that there is some asshole background process which is being rude and always asking for 44.1kHz or something.

One more thing: I am using soundflower in an aggregate device as a means to put all my generic audio output through the IK ARC correction VST. This is an insane hack job, basically I keep Reaper running all the time because I don't know a better way to get all my audio room-corrected (but only the audio that goes to main monitors). BUT, I have tried deleting the device and only having Live open, still get the glitches. Maybe I should just get rid of Soundflower entirely as it is a kernel extension.

For what it's worth, I am also getting random blue screen crashes (i.e. the mac crashes and reboots) due to some audio driver issue so I am thinking that maybe my stuff is just old (have not upgraded from Mojave due to the deprecating 32 bit stuff thing. However since my last laptop is still operational (11 years and going), I figured that maybe there is no point in keeping my main computer down and I should just bite the bullet and hopefully this will fix the issues I am currently having too.

[thawkins]

I just recorded a 10min ambient track with 4 stereo pairs simultaneously without a single problem. Starting to think something may be up with my default Live set that is causing these issues, or some M4L device is acting up.

That, or whoever cursed my PC made it so that things magically work when deadline is literally minutes away.

[Limo]

9 hours ago, thawkins said:

Starting to think something may be up with my default Live set that is causing these issues, or some M4L device is acting up.

 

 

13 hours ago, thawkins said:

One more thing: I am using soundflower in an aggregate device as a means to put all my generic audio output through the IK ARC correction VST. This is an insane hack job, basically I keep Reaper running all the time because I don't know a better way to get all my audio room-corrected (but only the audio that goes to main monitors).

 

[thawkins]

58 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

 

 

Yeah but I still get the glitches even if I shut everything else down except Live. Up to deleting the aggregate device and all that.

Like the Reaper instance is only for everything else that my system produces. When I am making music, it is shut down and I run the room correction directly in Live.