Hi all

Im trying to diagnose why im getting audio dropouts in Ableton by using Resplendence Latencymon. I have it running whilst Ableton is going and sure enough when the dropouts occur, Latencymon is reporting hard pagefaults on the Ableton process. Not good.

Has anyone had any experience of this? Ive been trying different fixed page file settings but non seem to be making any difference. Perhaps they wouldnt anyway, im not sure.

I should say as well that my system is totally stripped back so there is no wifi, power scheme etc stuff interfering. Ive bee googling and googling but cant seem to find out what to do, if indeed there is anything I can do.

Thanks in advance
E

It sounds like you are far more of an expert than me !

I have never had dropouts. Only two bits of trivial advice I can suggest:

Ableton likes lots of RAM. If you have less than 2GB it will struggle.

Ableton support is pretty good. On the couple of occasions I have had to use it, something sensible has come back within a day or so.

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I think you need to put some more information about your soundcard here as that could be the route of the problem

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Page faults occur when virtual memory is addressed that isn't in the machine's RAM, i.e. it is in the page file so has to be loaded into RAM from disc. Changing the size of your page file is unlikely to make any difference here.

The implication is therefore that you have insufficient memory for what you are trying to do. How much RAM do you have? What plug-ins are you using? Operating system?

A bit of an extreme way of checking this is to turn off your page file completely - if you don't have enough RAM your computer will fail ignominiously once it is all used up!

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Edited by Hairy Ears (15/02/12 12:46 PM)

That test has a tendency to give false positives for page faults, so I'd ignore it as a symptom as the software test itself tends to cause them.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Mr Bear:

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Hi all

Im trying to diagnose why im getting audio dropouts in Ableton by using Resplendence Latencymon. I have it running whilst Ableton is going and sure enough when the dropouts occur, Latencymon is reporting hard pagefaults on the Ableton process. Not good.

Has anyone had any experience of this? Ive been trying different fixed page file settings but non seem to be making any difference. Perhaps they wouldnt anyway, im not sure.

I should say as well that my system is totally stripped back so there is no wifi, power scheme etc stuff interfering. Ive bee googling and googling but cant seem to find out what to do, if indeed there is anything I can do.

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This isn't really about the Windows page file. It could be about having insufficient RAM installed. A Page Fault isn't an error - it just indicates that some code that needs to be in RAM isn't yet.

How much RAM do you have? There's really no excuse these days for having less than 4GB on a 32-bit system (yes, I know the system can't use all of it, but it's often the most convenient configuration.)

Hey!

Thanks for replying everyone. Still struggling with this as it happens....

My system is decent, and the problems occur even when I'm running a small project so I dont think it can be a RAM issue. I could be wrong tho. My spec is:

i5 2.40GHZ M520
4gb ram
Win 7 32bit
Alesis io2 running ASIO4all

Everything like wifi and other interfering driver things have been turned off.

These days I'm thinking/hoping the Alesis is the problem - its been nothing but trouble since I bought it and Alesis dont even make drivers for it now - their tech support told me to use asio4all. The risk is obviously shelling out 300 quid for a new interface to find the problems persist. Going to test with a friends m-audio interface this week tho and see if that helps.

Ive been running the latencymon and dpclat whilst ableton is running. What im finding is that the latency is low, circa 150 when I have my buffers at 256 and higher, but from 128 and lower it shoots up and is steady around 3000.

Hmmm, at a bit of a loss. Today when Im testing the DPC latency is staying low.... God damn it! But its still glitching out.

Thanks peoples
E

So just to get this stright.

Without the sound card plugged in what are you getting in DPC Latency test (not Latency mon)?

Does it only spike when the interface is plugged in?

If the answer to the above is no, then you need to work out the problem with the machine. Could be bios settings, drivers or some other random windows setting.

If the answer to the above is yes, it's time to try another interface.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog