ableton live 8 gaps & clicks...

[space6oy]

more of a help topic, but since people discuss ableton more in here...

posted this on the ableton forum. thought i'd ask here as well. just upgraded to 8, have a low CPU load and have tried messing w/ other settings but am still getting occasional gaps & clicks.

anyone has any suggestions, i'd appreciate it!

[snsr]

Definitely try increasing the audio buffer, that's generally the cause of clicks and glitches. Lag sucks, though; try to reduce the number of background processes. Use the Activity Monitor to see what processes are running, kill off things that you don't need, or just take note of which processes are resource-intensive.

2gb of ram should be plenty, but it's so cheap these days an additional 2gb wouldn't hurt.

edit-

@ableton, you mention that you still get clicks regardless of how many tracks are record enabled. How about when no tracks are record-enabled? Are the glitches recorded?

Is your hard drive full or extremely fragmented? As someone @ableton mentioned, wifi is a problem for people sometimes- try disabling that (as a test.)

[space6oy]

good call, i probably should up my ram... makes no sense w/ how low the % is though. will try increasing the buffer, but once lag's noticeable, that's just unacceptable

regardless, thanks for the suggestion. there are TONS of threads of problems over on the ableton forum, and really surprisingly few people giving helpful response...

[snsr]

No problem - the ableton forums always seemed a bit barren to me.

If you're not out of ram, and have plenty of cpu utilization headroom, there must be a busy bus or other type of bottleneck somewhere. Do you have any drives chained via firewire? Any firewire drives at all? Have you upgraded the video card to an aftermarket one?

[space6oy]

nope, no externals and the original video card... that just made me think of something though, i bet i have it set up to make sessions in its second internal hard drive like i did pro tools. maybe have to switch it to the main hd and just transfer sessions back and forth for storage/use...

[snsr]

nope, no externals and the original video card... that just made me think of something though, i bet i have it set up to make sessions in its second internal hard drive like i did pro tools. maybe have to switch it to the main hd and just transfer sessions back and forth for storage/use...

Can't hurt to try for troubleshooting purposes, but your current setup should be fine. Also, after a bit of reading, I don't think fragmentation is an issue with OS X and HFS. If your swap drive is full, though, excessive virtual memory swapping could contribute to audio glitches when you're recording. Check your memory usage w/ Activity Monitor when you have Live and all of your plugins running, and record enabled.

Also, do you have any other ASIO applications that you could test your firewire interface with? Did you have the same problem with Live 7?

[space6oy]

if i have anything other than live & pro tools, i've forgotten about it... will have to take a look.

i switched and tested both digimax with my digi002 before getting the firestudio to use with live. so i haven't tested the firestudio with any other apps... and i barely used it with 7 before upgrading. never noticed the glitch though. it's seriously scarce and random... but it ruins whatever i'm doing at the time.

[Electroluver]

If you haven't maxed out your Ram, that's the first thing you might do. I have a similar problem with my sound card (M-Audio Fast track pro) when using Cubase SX3. I turn off the wireless internet, turn off Norton, and raise the buffer to as high as it can go and still there are hick-ups with the audio?! My Ram is maxed out at 2gb's so it's going to have to do. Another solution is to render tracks with effects, but that's not really an "Ableton," approach as most people like to mess with their effects on Live.
There are also a bunch of tips and tricks to optimize your system on the internet; things like turning off automatic updates, canceling some background services, etc. Good luck Spac3boy