Ableton Live 9 has been the only DAW I’ve been working in since installing it last week, but not much music have been created. In the middle of my first real project with Live 9 I suddenly started to get serious glitches and audio dropouts and therefore most of my time has been spent troubleshooting my system. The Live set I’m talking about is of moderate size, with no 3rd party plug-ins, and should not bug down either my cpu or my ram. The first thing I did was using the test tool in Lives preferences, and what I experienced was very strange. I could set the buffer size at 64 samples, maximum cpu load (80%) and get a glitch free test tone back through my system. BUT, when I raised the buffer size to 128, 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 the test tone would get increasingly glitchy until total distortion and dropouts at 1024 and above. Normally the result should be quite the opposite. From this I concluded that there is a problem with the drivers of my audio interface, which by the way is a Steinberg MR816X. I then remembered that I had experienced small glitches also when using Live 8 in the past, but at the time I thought to myself it was due to some background tasks running on my Mac Pro computer and I never gave it a more thorough check.
After doing a fresh install of the drivers of my sound card I left the theory that my audio interface is the root of my problem and started looking for other causes. Here’s a list of things I’ve done:
· Made dummy live sets of different sizes for testing purposes. I made these sets with 3rd party plug-ins because I then can make comparable projects in Cubase. Cubase has been running flawless with all these test projects. Ableton Live 9 has not.
· Removed stuff from my system drive and made sure there are plenty of space left. All samples are located on my audio drive, which also has plenty of space.
· Run Repair Disk Permission
· Turned off WiFi and checked that there are no background tasks running on my computer (as far as I can see).
· Monitoring cpu/disk load via my computers monitoring tool while playing back the Live set. Found no spikes. Cpu and ram consumption is below any critical level.
In spite of my efforts, the result is that Ableton Live is still glitchy, even when running Live sets with a moderate cpu/ram load, and the problem is getting worse when increasing the buffer size. I’ve seen a few other Live users talking about having problems similar to mine, but it’s too early to conclude that this is a problem with Ableton Live. At the moment of writing it’s equally likely that the problem is in my setup.
Hope to have a solution in place very soon.
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