Huge problem with CC in Ableton

The Lounge Other Gear
#1

Hi everyone,

i’ll get straight to the point. I play in a band (with analog keys, love this machine so much) and our liveset is controlled by ableton on Windows 10 (Dell XPS 2015, i5, 8gb RAM, SSD).

As sound card, we use a Scarlett 4i4. Through the MIDI port of the sound card we connected the Roland pad and my guitarist’s Infinity Looper, the analog is connected to Overbridge over USB. Via Ableton we send Control Change to this Infinity Looper (for start recording, stop recording and overdub) and here’s the fact: not always the pedal respond correctly to the CC.

We noticed that doing a clean initial setup (turn on PC, turn on the sound card with every midi device already connected and turned on, connect sound card to PC, run mixcontrol, run Ableton) lower the possibility to create an error to the pedal.

We also run videos through ableton for each track we play, I say this because some of you might think the load on PC is high. In some rare case (1 out 5 times), during the session Ableton stutters, slowering the click for a moment, putting us not synced anymore with the backtracks (Buffer size?), forcing us to replay the track from the start.

So, i searched everywhere, we tried for months searching for a solution but still nothing came to surface. We can’t understand what is the source of this problem, if Windows10, if it’s a matter of Clock, if it’s the pedal and his CC (but we are sure that the commands are OK), if there is a specific setting to take care when using CC or else.

We really don’t know anymore. I ask help to anyone is expert dealing with Ableton and MIDI devices. Feel free to ask me question about the whole system!
Thank you!

#2

The thing about diagnosing these issues is there are many things involved with Midi

How exactly is this connected? does the looper connect via midi through or out from the pad? Is the pad set to its own specific midi channel that will not conflict with the looper?

It seems like your setup will allow you to take the Keys completely out of the equation, if you do this, do you still experience issues? You can also try with taking the pad out of the equation. Dummy down the setup until you find the culprit.

If all this does not work, I would try profiling your system and watch memory consumption when this start to happen, it could be the 4i4 is completely choking out the midi signals. You could also monitor the MIDI in from you 4i4 and instead of going to the looper, just come back into the soundcard to monitor the port. See if it spits out a bunch of garbage, or anything at all.

#3

definitely i’d monitor cpu and memory.

generally it’s never a good idea running audio, midi and video over the same computer.

#4

We have a midi splitter connected to the sound card midi port (OUT), so with this splitter we can connect both pad and looper (IN). And yeah, each device is set to its own midi channel (1 & 2)

yeah even without the keys the problem exists.[quote=“H445, post:2, topic:39464”]
just come back into the soundcard to monitor the port. See if it spits out a bunch of garbage, or anything at all.
[/quote]

How can we do that? I mean, monitoring what’s going on?[quote=“alfred, post:3, topic:39464, full:true”]
definitely i’d monitor cpu and memory.

generally it’s never a good idea running audio, midi and video over the same computer.
[/quote]

In the next days we’ll test with a Mac.