Thank you labpop,
I learned that my Rytm only requires USB2. I believe I had the right cable.
if any of the cables were incorrect as you suggest, would it not result in NO functionality? I was experiencing intermittent functionality.
I will attempt to replicate the crash tonight and keep these comments in mind.
Good to know. Thank you.
Never trust computers
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Yes its a power problem … had this multiple times but never in my studio.
It weren’t me, honest guv. I never done it!
Lord, I dunno man. I suspect that something was different between home and live, be it the power, the order things were switched on, something network related (MIDI over wifi errors or extra ports or something? It’s a bit beyond me tbh). There’s always going to be a first crash because life - the great disruptor - has a short attention span. Still, bummer. Don’t let it throw you off.
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When power hangs around seedy nightclubs, it inevitably becomes dirty.
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Dirty power is a euphamism for power related problems and can mean one of several things, or just be an overarching BS excuse for pretty much anything. A few examples:
- Voltage too low (makes mostly amps not sound right)
- Voltage too high (blows fuses)
- Poor Grounding (hums and buzzing, electric guitar players and vocalists getting electricuted)
- Large power consumers sharing the power with the audio system. This is the big and common one and also the biggest change from studio to stage. Live venues have lighting systems, big commercial HVACs, big refrigerators, espresso machines etc which can cause fluctuations in power conditions. In some circumstances and on some devices this can cause serious malfunctions.
That’s why in critical situations the audio always runs on a generator and that generator is not shared with any other major power consumers.
A UPS can solve this, but a setup such as the one you describe will need quite a heavy one
and can introduce major fuck-ups of it’s own. Not recommended in your circumstances.
It also won’t save you from changing USB hubs before the gig 
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I agree that computers are very ‘my way or the highway’. But in this case, Ableton would keep playing when the rest of the gear crashed. Ableton transport still running, midi triggers still active.
In your experience, would you have these issues later in the evening? Or also during soundcheck? (if you had a soundcheck)
Thanks colonel, I’ve managed to turn my frustration back towards the machines expressively. Been fruitful.
Yeah, I’m definitely looking closest at the things that were different between practice and venue. I had my wifi off, as many little background apps off, and our MIDI is hardwired.
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Thanks for this, Joe.
On stage we had 4 elektron boxes all branching from the same power source, but only the Rytm MK2 ‘froze’ and required a restart. This could make sense because it has 8 engines in it? Requiring the most power / most stable power?
At each crash, no other piece of equipment seemed bothered by the alleged dirtiness of the power.
With regard to “dirty power:”
I always run a Furman power conditioner from the wall at every venue, be it an electronic gig, dj gig, or acoustic gig.
One of my conditioners has a power meter or whatever it’s called on the front. At home it’ll fluctuate from like 120 volts down to 117 and then up to 122.
At a few venues I’ve seen it dip as low as 112 and go as high as 127 volts.
Kinda weird but makes me feel better that it’s running through a conditioner
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I don’t think the power is what caused your crash, I am in the “blame the usb hub” camp here. The number of engines does not make a device more or less sensitive to power fluctuations. It is more to do with the nature of the device and its power supply. Most electronic devices run on low DC voltages internally and so have a power supply that transforms the high AC mains voltage into whatever voltage(s) it needs. some of these power supplies handle fluctuations better than others. Then there are things like magnetic hard drives that are just sensitive to most anything (temperature, movement, dust, humidity, voltage).
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I have been unable to replicate the crashes with the same setups (minus my partner’s gear). Will try with the other half of the gear this Thursday and run a true duplicate of the setup and report back.
The Overhub gripes I’ve read in past forum posts have suggested problems that are consistently there, or not. Whereas I was having intermittent trouble. Maybe they just weren’t specifying.
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This is really interesting, I’ll look into this product, thank you very much.
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From my experience, here are a few differences at shows that we forget:
WiFi - make sure to disable it completely on your Mac, as it will be pinging for a connection and probably finding and updating many networks in the area, including all those people with personal hotspots left enabled. Can affect the Mac performance.
Bluetooth - same deal, disable it completely.
Don’t change a single thing (leads, adapters, power units, even plugboards) between rehearsal and show!
I’m with everyone suspecting the hub - and the usb cable to the rytm. What buffer size in Ableton did you have?
Was your Mac asleep or lid closed prior to going on stage? Things like audio interfaces or audio/midi over usb hate that - always disable that energy saver stuff.
In general you setup seems to have lots of potential points of failure, which you found out the hard way 
… is there a reason you have to use overbridge? I’ve seen instability (very sporadic, but it is there) with my DN and would not trust it live - hardware analog io and MIDI has been rock solid for me, combined with the Mac doing simple midi controller stuff in Ableton. You need a multi io interface though.
You could spend ages waiting for the crash again and not see it, so unless there’s a good reason to overbridge the ol drum machine I’d go a bit more old school and enjoy your next set without worrying if it will happen again.
Good luck mate!
P
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Almost sounds like how my AR behaves when I mistakenly create a MIDI feedback loop. Was your equipment collaboratively MIDI synced up with your partner’s computer or device MIDI clock? Or was possible that somehow more than one device had its MIDI Clock send enabled? This is like an episode of “Law & Order SVU.”
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I hadn’t considered that. The Rytm’s location in the chain requires send+receive. Will see what my partner’s midi settings are this week and report anything.
I guess the clocks could run for a while with a feedback loop, but then the inevitable tiny midi tempo shift would cause a spirograph and sink the ship.
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The problem with multiple MIDI Clock Sends being enabled is everything will work just fine until it suddenly doesn’t. In my case, the AR seems to hate receiving multiple MIDI Clocks more-so than any of my other Elektron devices.
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