Live performance with Bitwig problem

[LooFoX]

Hello everyone,

I created a live set in Bitwig which I tried to play at home last weekend.
It consists in 14 songs, 8 audio tracks (bass, kick, drum loop, 3 leads , pad, and FX) and I think between 150 to 200 scenes.
All clips are audio, 0 midi, all in Strech HD.
For the sends effects, I've put 6 sends : 4 that are here for playing with it (delay-1, reverb long, distorsion and blur) and 2 sends that I'm not playing but are more here for audio mixing (short reverb and a NY Compression send).
I didn't put any effects on the 8 tracks, and none are clipping, and I've just put a peak limiter (so bitwig internal stuff) on the master channel to prevent clipping.
I have tempo clips on my master channel to control the tempo changes between songs.

I'm controlling the live set with an Akai APC Mini and a Novation Launch Control.

And obviously during the performance try, I'm only using Bitwig on my windows laptop (not even google chrome launched).

And I'm getting lags during the performance, mainly when I'm launching an entire scene or launching multiples clips...

I don't know why I'm encoutering those problems? Are there software setups that I need to make in my Bitwig's project to prevent those lag problems? How you guys create your live performance Bitwig's projects?

I'm thinking in installing a Linux partition on my laptop to try playing the live on it (maybe windows is the problem?) but am not sure if this will make any change?

Or maybe it comes from my setup? I've a Windows 10 MSI laptop with a quadcore i7, 8 Gb RAM and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2.

I really don't want to even think about switching to Ableton juste for Live performing, I'm more than happy with Bitwig as a production software and would like to be able to perform live with it, so all your help are welcome here .

Thank you in advance for your feedbacks.

Regards,

LooFoX

[seipster]

I have been doing live-shows with both Traktor and Bitwig running. No problems, but

I have only native bitwig plugs in the project.

Last time I had Traktor on S4MKII and Bitwig on Audiofuse. Before that both ran on S4MKII as audiocard.

I worked great on OSX and now I do it on Win10 (Since NI does not release a linux version of Traktor ).
I have done this in my win-installation: https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/ ... Windows-10

I can send you my current live-project if you want to try it (PM me).



3 live inputs / midi / Audio (hybrid-tracks)
4 Midi tracks
1 Riddim group track
4 FX tracks

[Head Under Water]

I have the same issue with my larger live set projects.
I have found it to be nessesary for now to limit the number of tracks/scenes and also audio data in a project to keep it responsive and problem free. Using 8 scenes per song and a lot of tracks (about 40-60), I don't go over 6-8 songs in a project anymore, which is sort of fine for now cause that is usually a set-length after which you can switch projects. But of course I would wish for better performance with huge projects.

[abique]

Hi,

Is your computer in performance mode? Did your CPU clock down?
Do you have an SSD? If not, did your hard disk stopped spinning?
Did the UI stop responding?
What was lagging? The UI? The sound? Both?
How was the DSP meter and the IO meter?

Thank you,
Alex.

[Taika-Kim]

I've always had the problem than when many clips start at once, or sometimes even one clip, there's a small lag. If I play the same passage again immediately, there's no lag, but coming back later to the same position introduces the lag again. It might be computer specific? I have Windows 7 pro 64 and Phenom II X6 1055T.

[abique]

Taika-Kim, are your samples on a SSD?

[LooFoX]

Thank you all for your feedbacks .

I tested this morning the Focusrite's optimisation process shared by seipster (made all 6 steps).

I then made a 30 mins runthrough of my live set (so ~ 5 of the 14 tracks) and I didn't experienced any lag !
I think step 5 was important in my case because I find that there was a lot of Windows background app, for the most part got from the fact that it's a MSI laptop. Just after finishing this step I instantly felt better windows performances .

So a big thank you to seipster for this advice, and I'm keeping an eye on all your advices if I again run in lag problems .

Good day to all of you.

Regards,

LooFoX

[abique]

Thank you, that's good to know that it was not a bitwig issue

[Taika-Kim]

Samples are on a disc hard drive, but it's a WD Caviar Black that's pretty fast. And I never experienced this with Reaper for example, maybe they just have different buffering systems, I know because BW runs everything in audio rate in realtime, a predicting system like Reaper has is not possible to implement.

And I'm pretty sure that I've had this happen with MIDI clips too, but I will keep an eye on this.

[Netsu]

You could try turning auto-suspend off, especially if you're using any external plugins.

[Taika-Kim]

Yes, I think one of the devs said that sometimes some plugins take a bit of time to resume action, and it can't be helped from the DAWs side, it's up to the plugin developers to ensure that they behave.