KVR Audio

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:06 am

So I'm trying out Ableton Live 10 Suite and getting discouraged. My computer is a laptop Dell Latitude E6410 with and i5 Processor and 8GB of RAM. It meets the minimum requirements for Ableton Live 10 Suite. Anyone know why some of the Ambient and Evolving instruments might be malfunctioning? The sound it makes is like ... hard to describe. Reminds me of a record player crackle noise where the needle comes into contact with the vinyl and crackles followed by silence.

shonky · Post by **shonky** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:27 am

What does the CPU meter on Ableton say when this is occurring? Had issues with noises and glitches when it first starts up and with noticeable CPU spikes, but it appears this is part of the indexing process and should stop when it's finished.

Otherwise, maybe raise your soundcard's buffer size. Use the test tone in Preferences>Audio to find out at what point the sine appears to break up as this should indicate the point your system has an issue (the cpu meter in Live shows the percentage of time it takes to process audio, so if it spikes at 200%, it means that it will take 4s to process 2s of audio, hence crackles and unexpected junglist timestretching).

rod_zero · Post by **rod_zero** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:31 am

Windows isn't designed for real time audio, out of the box it can present problems like this.

The first thing you should try is downloading the ASIO4all driver, after installing it go to Live preferences and select it as your audio device, it should give you better performance.

Also in the preferences section in the audio setup play around with the "buffer size" settings, around 256-1024 should give you better audio performance. Also lower the sample rate to 44.1khz.

Nevertheless the best solution for this problem is using an external audio interface with it's own ASIO drivers, for example the Steinberg UR12.

You should also check the power settings configuration of the laptop, change it to "best performance", usually laptops come with more conservative settings to save battery and throttle the CPU speed.

shonky · Post by **shonky** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:34 am

Completely skipped my mind that anyone might not be using ASIO

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:44 pm

shonky wrote:What does the CPU meter on Ableton say when this is occurring? Had issues with noises and glitches when it first starts up and with noticeable CPU spikes, but it appears this is part of the indexing process and should stop when it's finished.

Otherwise, maybe raise your soundcard's buffer size. Use the test tone in Preferences>Audio to find out at what point the sine appears to break up as this should indicate the point your system has an issue (the cpu meter in Live shows the percentage of time it takes to process audio, so if it spikes at 200%, it means that it will take 4s to process 2s of audio, hence crackles and unexpected junglist timestretching).

It's funny... I'm having a hard time reproducing the problem now; which may be a good thing.

I so hope it's over. Thank you for your thoughtful reply!

I have a support request in at Ableton. Their email bot sent me an article that talks about the buffer size, but I'm waiting to see what size I should go with for my particular laptop. Thank you again.

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:47 pm

Ok, I've recreated the problem. It only happens when I use Launchkey 49. I can't believe it. I've totally fallen head over heels for this controller, and now this! The outrage... Lol.

EDIT: Not sure if I'm correct in my assumption that it's the controller. But it has only ever done it when I'm using the controller, however it's not doing it now. I don't want to have to reload Live in order for my controller to work effectively.

rod_zero · Post by **rod_zero** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 7:36 pm

spendthrift2 wrote:Ok, I've recreated the problem. It only happens when I use Launchkey 49. I can't believe it. I've totally fallen head over heels for this controller, and now this! The outrage... Lol.

EDIT: Not sure if I'm correct in my assumption that it's the controller. But it has only ever done it when I'm using the controller, however it's not doing it now. I don't want to have to reload Live in order for my controller to work effectively.

It's not the controller (unless the controller is sending unwanted midi data), but I suspect that with the controller you can play more notes at once then it uses more CPU then you get the pops and cracks easier than with using the computer keyboard for triggering notes.

thecontrolcentre · Post by **thecontrolcentre** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 7:55 pm

Are you using an ASIO audio interface? If not, get ASIO4All. Its free, and will help if you set it up properly.

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:35 pm

rod_zero wrote:
spendthrift2 wrote:Ok, I've recreated the problem. It only happens when I use Launchkey 49. I can't believe it. I've totally fallen head over heels for this controller, and now this! The outrage... Lol.

EDIT: Not sure if I'm correct in my assumption that it's the controller. But it has only ever done it when I'm using the controller, however it's not doing it now. I don't want to have to reload Live in order for my controller to work effectively.
It's not the controller (unless the controller is sending unwanted midi data), but I suspect that with the controller you can play more notes at once then it uses more CPU then you get the pops and cracks easier than with using the computer keyboard for triggering notes.

I tried to control for that by playing multiple keys on my laptop keyboard before plugging in to the novation. It seems to only happen part of the time, however. Not sure how I'm going to reproduce the problem for tech support. fingers crossed

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:37 pm

thecontrolcentre wrote:Are you using an ASIO audio interface? If not, get ASIO4All. Its free, and will help if you set it up properly.

I'm not very good at setting things up, but I've heard that the ASIO4ALL thing will help. I'm not sure I want to download it before I fully understand it. Thank you for the helpful suggestion! I will likely ask the tech from Ableton or someone from Novation about it tomorrow.

generaldiomedes · Post by **generaldiomedes** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 1:05 am

With an I5 laptop unfortunately you are really going to have to watch your CPU usage. Good instruments with low CPU usage include sylenth1, massive, ableton operator. Sample based players such as kontakt are also lower cpu but unfortunately chew more memory. All of the built in ableton effects are low CPU or have low quality settings. Note that pads do chew up more CPU just because the notes are longer.

Ableton wavetable especially will probably not support more than a few instances ( I have tried this on an i5 personally), although they seem to be tweaking the performance with each release.

Other than increasing your buffer size, you can bounce tracks, turn the midi note into a sample, set your instruments to low quality, use ableton effects instead of the instruments effects, and also tweak your computers performance settings (ableton has a support page for that).

nix808 · Post by **nix808** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 3:29 am

a VSTi called 'Synth1' will use the minimum CPU required for a complexish sound
the synth may help you with the processing speed(buffer length)
Our buffer length(latency) can be mitigated with a purpose built soundcard, like the Steinberg mentioned by rod_zero

IMO- what you are getting here is buffer underruns, which cause clicks and pops somewhat. You will get more sound breakup when you try a smaller buffer

ASIO4all is not any sort of shonkware, but it is a difficult problem to fix-
AFAIK it is actually wasapi? They do their best to mate with the mobo soundcard

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 3:35 am

Thank you everyone. I ended up getting ASIO4ALL. It reset the buffer to 512 or something too. So now the buffer is higher than it was (256). I haven't noticed any latency at all. I think the problem is part of the way fixed. There is one instrument that still pops an crackles, but that's ok. I don't like that instrument anyway. It's significantly better now.

Also, for anyone else, Ableton has this to say on their site. https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... #soundcard

nix808 · Post by **nix808** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:12 am

Oh cool,
glad it's not something else.
512 samples buffer is showing around 1/75th of a second total around trip delay here in FL VST host.
so it's pretty snappy- 1/75th after pressing a key the sound enters the the slow atmosphere

This buffering thing is a setting you will play with if you keep making computer music

njoy the modern tech mate, hope it's now not being problematic
If you need it 8 or 16 can be got on Windows too now

spendthrift2 · Post by **spendthrift2** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:50 pm

So I finally spoke with Ableton and we were able to determine what was causing the crackling issue. Certain machines running i5 processors have a weird default, like mine. Within advanced power settings there is an option to adjust minimum and maximum processor state. That's what I had to do. It was set really low; at 5%. The woman working with me had me adjust it to 100%. She also warned that I should keep myy laptop plugged in while I'm working to avoid battery depletion.

Sorry for the mixup!

Ableton Live 10 Suite 30 Day Trial - Crackling, Dropping Out