Ableton Loops create 'skip' or 'glitch' sound

[Christlofer]

Hi guys

I've been using Ableton quite extensively for the last year, and feel pretty confident that I know what I am doing. I have a computer that can handle it, my instrument library is on an external SSD, have a solid interface, and generally everything works great.

But...

When using loops in a live session, there is sometimes (not always, but most times) an audio 'glitch' when the loop begins. I have tried all sorts of things to stop it from happening, but there is one particular song in which it will not stop. There are 3 different loops all running simultaneously, all starting and stopping at different points. I have MIDI clips set up that send data to the Ableton loopers which are in my return tracks, telling them when to record, when to stop, when to play/overdub etc. (essentially it plays a note - eg C1, and the looper record button is set to respond to C1 from that particular MIDI channel... so at any point in the track I can set the looper to do whatever I need it to).

I have messed around with the starting them all on different beats, changed the quantisation and moved the MIDI notes around to change the starting point, tried muting the tracks for that moment when they start (the glitch does not seem to come through the audio of the track, but from Ableton's general output...), disabling the first loop - but it still seems to happen to the other two, and all to no avail.

Disk usage is at around 9-11%. It is an audio loop that I am recording in real time... so there should be no reason for it to hiccup like this. There is also no audio going through the loop when it starts to record (I thought that this might have been the reason for the glitches early on in my investigations). It's a real problem, as these loops are integral to the song.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Really tough to know what else to do... it seems like this might just be a bug in Ableton... except that I have a bunch of other songs that are also loop heavy, and are fine. It doesn't really make too much sense.

Any help would be most appreciated. Hopefully I've made this clear enough, but any questions please fire away.

Chris

 

[FXHound]

Hi guys

When using loops in a live session, there is sometimes (not always, but most times) an audio 'glitch' when the loop begins.

Any help would be most appreciated. Hopefully I've made this clear enough, but any questions please fire away.

Chris

This is old news. Essentially what is happening is Ableton used their favorite loop detection routines and sliced the samples. Because they sell so many samples, I guess nobody at their company, not even interns were unleashed to produce crisp & clean loops.

I'm currently learning Ableton just for audio FX and I noticed this couple decades old problem. Just as in software samplers in the very old days of the "demo scene", you simply need to go in with a "begin" and "end" indicator and zoom in really nice and find a place in the sample where the end and the begin of the loop has similar positions in the waveform. Easiest is to simply find a place, where the waveform is at the center-line of both begin and end, then you are done. No more clicks. In these modern times people are completely forgetting to go back to the machine-level. Professionals just simply grab a pencil in a sample editor and draw the waveform by hand, so it matches exactly how they want it to look & sound.