Sound dropping out during recording

[polarfleece89]

I am using a saffire pro 40 with a digimax LT 8 and today I was trying to record a live set for a video one of my bands is trying to do. Something I haven't experienced before happened today (I have been using this set up for about 5 years) where during the recording everything is apparently working fine for a while, but occasionally we would notice that the real time display of the wavs being recorded would start lagging. So, for example, after we finished playing a song Ableton was still apparently writing parts of the tracks where music was playing. It caught up after about 30 seconds but when we actually pressed stop on the recording everything that had been latently writing itself to the project disappeared and turned into silence. It's 15 tracks recording but in the past I haven't had any issue being able to do that. Lately I've noticed more issues with latency on other projects while I'm mixing where the fw active LED will occasionally flip off and then back on (causing drops in the audio). I'm not sure if it's an issue with the interface or with my FireWire card or something else.. I use a Lenovo w530 laptop with 16gb ram and an i7 processor.. I'm not sure the exact make of the FireWire card but I can get it. I would be very very Appreciative of any information or help anybody could offer.

This is my first post on this forum so I apologize if I'm not posting in the right spot im just really trying to get some help because I use this set up for recording pretty regularly and I don't have a lot of money to invest in upgrading any of the hardware I'm using :/ it's worked really flawlessly at points in time, up to just a few months ago. Any advice is really appreciated,
Thank you very much in advance

 

[Papanate]

I am using a saffire pro 40 with a digimax LT 8 and today I was trying to record a live set for a video one of my bands is trying to do. Something I haven't experienced before happened today (I have been using this set up for about 5 years) where during the recording everything is apparently working fine for a while, but occasionally we would notice that the real time display of the wavs being recorded would start lagging. So, for example, after we finished playing a song Ableton was still apparently writing parts of the tracks where music was playing. It caught up after about 30 seconds but when we actually pressed stop on the recording everything that had been latently writing itself to the project disappeared and turned into silence. It's 15 tracks recording but in the past I haven't had any issue being able to do that. Lately I've noticed more issues with latency on other projects while I'm mixing where the fw active LED will occasionally flip off and then back on (causing drops in the audio). I'm not sure if it's an issue with the interface or with my FireWire card or something else.. I use a Lenovo w530 laptop with 16gb ram and an i7 processor.. I'm not sure the exact make of the FireWire card but I can get it. I would be very very Appreciative of any information or help anybody could offer.

This is my first post on this forum so I apologize if I'm not posting in the right spot im just really trying to get some help because I use this set up for recording pretty regularly and I don't have a lot of money to invest in upgrading any of the hardware I'm using :/ it's worked really flawlessly at points in time, up to just a few months ago. Any advice is really appreciated,
Thank you very much in advance

Is your Storage/HardDrive getting full?

 

[polarfleece89]

Is your Storage/HardDrive getting full?

I didn't think so but maybe? my operating system is on an internal SSD and I record onto a seperate internal HDD.. the SSD has about 18 free gigs and the HDD has about 60 free gigs which I thought would be plenty for basically a half hour of recording. Does that seem fair or is my gauge off?

 

[Papanate]

I didn't think so but maybe? my operating system is on an internal SSD and I record onto a seperate internal HDD.. the SSD has about 18 free gigs and the HDD has about 60 free gigs which I thought would be plenty for basically a half hour of recording. Does that seem fair or is my gauge off?

That's pretty full for a Storage HD. I would start there.

 

[polarfleece89]

That's pretty full for a Storage HD. I would start there.

Ok yeah, thank you, I actually decided to free up a bunch of space last night I'm at about 60 gb free now on the SSD.. do you think that's a fair amount of free space to have? I was still having the issue with the wav form lagging as it was recording but none of the data loss was occurring. Earlier tonight I was trying to record a single track over these other tracks and having issues with the audio stopping, like as in Ableton freezing up. I cleared the cache and it seems to be working better for now but I guess I'm just nervous about whether or not it will be consistent

 

[Papanate]

Ok yeah, thank you, I actually decided to free up a bunch of space last night I'm at about 60 gb free now on the SSD.. do you think that's a fair amount of free space to have? I was still having the issue with the wav form lagging as it was recording but none of the data loss was occurring. Earlier tonight I was trying to record a single track over these other tracks and having issues with the audio stopping, like as in Ableton freezing up. I cleared the cache and it seems to be working better for now but I guess I'm just nervous about whether or not it will be consistent

I go with at least 200 GB clear to be safe.

 

[polarfleece89]

I go with at least 200 GB clear to be safe.

Okay, thanks. Can ask how big your hard drive is? Also I'm curious if that seems like the most likely cause for an issue like that, or does that seem like a symptom of a hard drive actually failing? Or could my cpu or firewire card be at fault? I guess it makes the most sense for the wavs in the timeline lagging while they're writing to the disk since that's what is actually being displayed but I'm also experiencing total freezes while recording. Ableton stops responding and then when it unfreezes the recording continues and the audio just jumps from the moment before the freeze to the moment immediately after. I appreciate any help or thoughts, I'm just not really sure what's happening. Which is probably very obvious haha

 

[Papanate]

Okay, thanks. Can ask how big your hard drive is? Also I'm curious if that seems like the most likely cause for an issue like that, or does that seem like a symptom of a hard drive actually failing? Or could my cpu or firewire card be at fault? I guess it makes the most sense for the wavs in the timeline lagging while they're writing to the disk since that's what is actually being displayed but I'm also experiencing total freezes while recording. Ableton stops responding and then when it unfreezes the recording continues and the audio just jumps from the moment before the freeze to the moment immediately after. I appreciate any help or thoughts, I'm just not really sure what's happening. Which is probably very obvious haha

My Harddrive is a 1tb SSD - and I've filled about 489 GBs. It might be a hard drive failing - you should test it out - but its not likely unless you are experiencing wonkiness with other programs. Not likely the CPU - again if failing then everything would be affected. Firewire Card - if it's failing. Could also be you have. your Latency set too low for your computer.

 

[polarfleece89]

My Harddrive is a 1tb SSD - and I've filled about 489 GBs. It might be a hard drive failing - you should test it out - but its not likely unless you are experiencing wonkiness with other programs. Not likely the CPU - again if failing then everything would be affected. Firewire Card - if it's failing. Could also be you have. your Latency set too low for your computer.

Okay cool, thanks for the advice! I'll try running some tests on all that stuff.

 

[DM60]

Ableton has an indicator if you are having HD read issues. It could be phase issues, mute a channel to see if might correct it and/or use the utility function to reverse polarity on various tracks. Worth looking into.

 

[rob aylestone]

I don't think its lack of space - because being honest, looking back at my old HD drives on the shelf, 40Gb was considered big at one time - However, what IS important on drives that show a small percentage left, is when that space has been previously written to and overwritten so the drive is fragmented. Then the DAW has to spend time searching free blocks and shuffling data around rather than just recording contiguous data which speeds things amazingly. Defragmenting discs gets done less now because drives are bigger - but while it doesn't matter for most things - it does for audio and video. I'd run a disc health tool on both drives and see if it can clear some space.

 

[Papanate]

Defragmenting discs gets done less now because drives are bigger - but while it doesn't matter for most things - it does for audio and video. I'd run a disc health tool on both drives and see if it can clear some space.

This is a Windows machine? I didn't realize that Windows would perform a defragmentation on a drive - I thought that utility had gone away.

 

[TalismanRich]

Windows actually does defragmentation on a regular basis (I think its supposed to be weekly). It's called Optimize now. It will defrag mechanical drives and trim SSDs.