PC Gurus / Ableton Gurus PLEASE HELP!!!

Miscellaneous
1

Hi guys,

Anyone who’s XP, windows, Ableton savvy and or got a M Audio Quattro please have a read and save my life…

I’ve got a BIG problem and I would really appreciate your help.

I upgraded Ableton from 5 to 6 on my laptop this weekend as I had no gigs and  - I’ve tested it on the studio machine and I thought it was all fine…

But no! After DJing for 1 hour 15mins or more (this happens consistantly) Ableton starts to glitch then gets worse and worse till it sounds like a really really really timestreched sample.

I noticed that the Available Ram (in windows task manager) is slowly being eaten up - this looks like a classic memory leak to me.

I’m using a few VST plug-ins, but even when I remove them from ableton it doesn’t sort out the problem when it’s in the middle of throwing a wobbly, which usually means its not a VST plugin issue - am I right?

The CPU is on 15%, so it’s not that.

I’ve only got a Gig of Ram, but that should be enough…

I’ve upgraded to the very latest update and I think it’s slightly less bad, but still not usuable.

If I change the ASIO driver from one interface to the other the problem goes away - which I think is a massive clue. Possibly a ASIO buffer leak? At the very least it’s a “get of of jail free card” till I sort the issue -  if I take both interfaces and switch when it goes pear shaped - I’ll have to deal with the 1 sec of silence and weird glitch but it’s better than the alternative

Now I can’t use 5 anymore because it’ll mean I have to re-warp all my tracks as the warps are not backward compatible…

And I have some really important gigs coming up on the weekend, the first of which is a 4 hour set - so I’m not in a good position right now…

Questions

  1. When the system runs out of RAM does it commit some of the memory to the Page FIle and then dump it out of RAM to give free space?

  2. Is throwing another GIG of ram gonna do anything other than delay the issue by a few mins?

  3. Is it likely to be a ASIO driver issue with the quattro I’m lugging to gigs at the moment?? i.e. will using a different audio interface make the problem go away?

  4. Are Ableton and M-Audio involved in a conspiracy designed to rob me of my free time, sanity and sleep??

All help mucho appreciated!!

2

david, i hate to hear that. i have l6. i have one gig of ram in my lappy and have never had that kind of issue with 6. i have read about other people having that problem and i think that it is a bad audio driver.(not 100% sure tho) can you borrow another card and test it to find out. i used the kore controller for my last live show for 1.5 hours with no hangs at all. i think that the quatro is a quarki y card.

what vsts are you running and could the “leak” be coming from something else?

good luck i know how much of a pain these things can be, makes me want to switch back to vinyl sometimes

3

Hey mate… I’m really sorry I don’t have a lot of time to throw at this right now, but maybe you could grab a copy of a couple of tools I use to track this kinda stuff, both by SysInternals (MS) called TaskMon and ProcMon - they’ll give you much more detail than the windoze task manager.

You might like to d/l an audio router thing, so that live is sending data to that driver, might give a hint…

4

The VSTs I’m running are 7 * Ohmboys, 7 * Camelspace, 1 * Sonalkis Mast Compressor

I’m gonna try out my other soundcard - but like I said it takes at least and hour and a half to flush the problem out, so it’s a massive PIA debugging it, especially as my time is so limited at the moment…

cheers for the tips Styrd, I’ll  be checking them out and I’ll report back…

5

I hate those kinda faults :frowning:

No sweat man just kick off your set and walk off and cook dinner. At least you’ll have something tasteful to throw up on it when it makes you sick  ;D

PS still LMAO at the new avatar!

6

hey Stryd,

I’m really sorry I don’t have a lot of time to throw at this right now,

dude - please don’t aplogise - I appreciate any time you are kind enough to take to help out…

PS still LMAO at the new avatar!

yeah, powdered drugs are soooo last year!

7

OK, I’m no guru but I can help you with a couple of things:

  1. Yes, that’s exactly what it does.

  2. Possibly, probably not. Either your memory usage will stabilise at >1gig (unlikely) or it’ll fill up the second gig at around the same rate as the first.

We use a freeware collection called the PC Repair System here at work, and we’ve found it to be invaluable for troubleshooting stuff like this - as well as being a damn usefull load of utilities in its own right. You can get it from http://www.dailycupoftech.com/usb-drive-systems/3/.

8

Side note: Is your pagefile size fixed at 1.5Gig?

9

no, the PF is  variable -  more than enough room…

10

That’s not a good thing… You want it fixed at 1.5x your RAM for a DAW, otherwise the system will thrash your drive resizing it and slow things down - especially on a laptop where you prolly have a 5k4rpm drive.

11

cheers for the tip - I’ll reset it immediately!

it’s a 7200 drive btw…

I’m going back in tonight for some more serious testing - fingers crossed…

12

david,

as an audio engineer not looking at RAM consumption in the first place, your problem to me sound more like an audio card loosing SYNC. do you use digital inputs? I am asking because a similar sound effect can be introduced when you start with proper sync, then loose the sync, the soundcard tries very hard to keep up, and finally streches the audio.

something similar happend to me with a large ProTools rig which was synced to a DAT machine, which switched off after 1 hour of not touching it (this happend during a live radio broadcast…----))))

13

Audioworld,

I’m not using digital inputs, but that’s a very good point!

And it would explain why switching the Asio driver from one interface to the other and then back (without stopping the audio) worked, and sorted the problem out.

My 2 main suspects are ASIO problem, maybe related to buffers or a RAM/Cache issue…

The steching/formanting thing is the most curious thing of all, I wouldn’t expect a straight Cache/RAM issue to do that.

I’ll keep y’all up to date on the developments…

14

not wanting to tempt fate or anything, but I think I’ve sorted it.

DiskCaching issue - the only way to fix it is using a UDF (undocumented feature). You creating a file way within the ableton file structure and put a command line in there telling it to turn off the disk caching.

this is a pretty poor show from Ableton to say the least, I shudder to think what it could do to a lot of other DJs and to Ableton’s reputation…

still (hopefully) all fixed and I’ve ordered some lovely low latency OCZ ram for my laptop (albeit under duress), so she should fly by tommorrow eveing…