Disk overload with Ableton Sampler/Simpler

Hi there,

first of all, congrats to this impressive product. I am playing around with the trial and really considering making the buy.

Still, I’ve got severe issues in Ableton 11. Everything works fine for midi instruments like Tension or Operator. But when I use Sampler (Grand Piano for instance) or Simpler I immediatly run into disk overload: as soon as I hit a string the disk overload indicator flashes immediately combined with poor latency and audio cracks. This makes it impossible to play live.

The thing is, the disk overoad does not happen for those exact instruments, when I trigger midi notes via the computer keyboard on the exact same track.
I already tried to lower buffer size, tweak system performance, load all samples into RAM - no success.

The CPU load is around 5%, the RAM load around 20% - no spikes recognizable. I’ve got an i7, 32 GB DDR4 RAM and modern SSD disk. The only older component in my system is the Steinberg UR22 USB audio interface (no latency issues so far).

I am searching for a solution for live performance. If I can’t use Sampler a huge bunch of emulated instruments would get rendered useless for my purpose.

Any help would be appreciated!
Many thanks in advance and BR

Edit: I am using it as VST plugin. What I see over here Midi Guitar Magic! (Free Ableton Live Template) - YouTube - this guy is using as Audio Unit. Might this be the trick? I’ll check it out later on…

sounds familiar: Ableton’s sampler is allergic to pitchbend commands. So filter them out of the midi stream and it should work fine. MG sends pitchbend=0 even though you have turned ptichbends off, just to prevent having mistuned synths. and that is something that puts the sampler off.
You can filter the midi in Ableton if I remember correctly.

aha, interesting - many thanks for your reply. I will give that a try later on. Is it this Max for Live device Bend Filter version 1.0 by stev on maxforlive.com you mean for filtering the midi stream?

I don’t know, but I think you can safely just try it :wink:

You should probably start with switching to the AU plugin. I can’t get Abelton to work with my VST version when I tried it just now. But the AU on the other hand presented no issues. I tried both the Simpler and the Sampler instruments and all played fine, even allowing for bends to be recognized. So start there. For those cases where I want to filter out Pitch Bends I use the M4Live Pitch Wheel (MIDI effect). It has a MUTE IN button, that makes it easy enough to use. But no overload using the AU (for me). :+1:

Many thanks for trying out and suggesting AU. I forgot - this is a Mac format and I am on Windows :wink:

But now it comes: Putting the midi filter plugin into the chain resolves my issue - BUT: even without filtering the bending information (you can switch the filter on and off). It works by just throwing the filter module in and leaving everything as is. Removing the filter brings back my disk overload. I reproduced this on a second Windows PC and the same thing happened there.

Amazing, maybe it’s something about the MIDI format MG sends and the filter plugin modifies? Anyway, my issue seems to be resolved for today - thanks for your hints! Let’s see what tomorrow brings :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: