Yesterday, I tried upgrading to latest Ableton’s Live, the 9.7.1 version. Everything went well, but I got other issues, not related to Live, that made my work session quite bad and frustrating.
S/PDIF not working great
A month ago, I got a new audio interface: the Focusrite’s Scarlett 18i20. This amazing device provides eight analog audio inputs and 10 outputs. This is far from the advertised 18 inputs and 20 outputs, but these include S/PDIF and an add-on card that plugs into the optical ports of the interface. Anyway, 8 inputs is more than enough for my needs. I have difficulty playing one instrument reliably, so I won’t start playing multiple instruments at the same time, at least not now!
I didn’t have enough long audio jack cables to plug my Novation’s Ultranova (two channels), my Korg’s EMX (two channels) and my Nord’s Drum (1 one channel), so I decided to try hooking my Ultranova through S/PDIF instead. For this, I used a RCA cable I had got somewhere I don’t remember. I plugged the S/PDIF coaxial output of the synthesizer to the appropriate input of the audio interface, then fiddled with MixControl to figure out HOW to enable S/PDIF. Easy, I thought: just set up one entry in the Mix 1 to route S/PDIF L to left channel and S/PDIF R to right channel. The Mix 1 mix was already routed to the two monitor outputs of the interface. With that, I should have obtained sound from my Ultranova into my audio monitors. No, nothing! I verified that the S/PDIF output was enabled from my Ultranova: it was.
I tried, checked many times, searched on the Web, ok, set the sync source to S/PDIF instead of Internal, from MixControl. Did it, no result. I spent at least half an hour trying, checking, trying again, to find that the volume of my Ultranova was turned all the way to minimum. Turning up the volume solved it!
BUT I started to hear cracking sounds from time to time. This happens especially when playing long notes with pad-style sounds. That means S/PDIF doesn’t work well out of my Ultranova, in my audio interface, or that requires a special cable I don’t have. But then WHY is the S/PDIF the exact same shape as an RCA connector?
There is no solution for the moment, except using the analog jacks and not being able to plug my EMX, Ultranova and Drum at the same time.
Jumpy mouse
While trying to work with Ableton’s Live and the MixControl, I had to cope with too small fonts all the times. I ended up using Windows zoom (Windows key plus +). But regularly, the zoom was jumping all around. I figured out that this was the mouse pointer that was regularly moving around without obvious reason. Ah, this is why I am now literally constantly loosing the pointer, forced to bring it back at upper left corner of the screen almost each time I want to click on something! The pointer is really jumping around, I’m not getting crazy! This made working with the mouse a real pain, similar to what I experienced with the old Mac my brother’s wife gave me a year ago. I thought about running Live on that Mac, because many people pretend that Mac’s are more stable for music production, but the machine is way way way too slow for that, I just forgot and never tried!
I ended up trying with another mouse, that seemed to be a bit better, but I realized that the right button was completely non-working!!! Why the hell did I keep this stupid mouse then? I threw it in the thrash can and put back the first one. Then I figured out that putting the mouse on a piece of white paper helped, making it a lot less jumpy.
Windows update restarting computer while I’m using it
Windows 10 sometimes automatically restarts the computer to apply some updates. Up to now, this only happened while the machine was idle. Well yesterday, it happened right in my face, while I was working with Live! I got so pissed off by this that I tried to disable this really bad functionality. I fortunately figured out a way to disable these forced updates. It was relatively easy, although it caused me trouble because my Windows is in French and the procedure was in English. If this procedure doesn’t work and spurious reboots happen too often, this may force me to downgrade to Windows 8 or Windows 7, or switch to Mac and have constant trouble with too small fonts. This could be a dead end case leading me to stop using my computer, at least stop trying to make music with this.
Slower and slower machine
My main computer is on a desk while my music gears are on a table on the opposite wall. I tried to link them together using a long USB cable and a hub, but that failed with crashes from Ableton’s Live. However, my attempts were with the audio interface built into my Ultranova. Maybe I’ll have more luck with my Focusrite, if the cable and hub are stable enough. Why an hub? Well, this is to get a keyboard and mouse next to my music table. I will also transport video through an HDMI cable and get a screen nearby as well.
But for now, I ended up having to use my Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 13 ultrabook for attempts at music production. This worked relatively well, but the machine is starting to be slow since I updated it to Windows 10. Searching on forums gives no result, except other people are experiencing performance problems, sometimes on Windows 10, sometimes on Windows 8.1. Starting Live is now taking almost 45 seconds on this machine. Fortunately, the program is responding correctly for now, until of course I add enough tracks and effects to my Live set to make it choke up like crazy. I guess this will happen if I go far enough in music production.
Difficulties with music production itself
Creating the track I had in mind caused me great trouble. While not super complex, it is not a trivial repeat drum beat. I managed to play it a couple of times, started the recording on my EMX and messed it up completely. I tried again, messed it up again. I cannot play it reliably unless I try 25 times and more. The workaround is to correct notes, but this is quite tedious on the EMX. Tired of this, I tried to record MIDI using my Ultranova as a source and Live as a sequencer. But even from Live, fixing the incorrect notes was a real pain. I experimented with the quantization which also didn’t work correctly.
There is no well-defined workflows and no comprehensive tutorials about music production. All I can find is case-specific pro tips, sometimes involving plugins I don’t want to install yet. I’m just overwhelmed with Live itself, having to constantly check and redo what I am doing, this is not a great time to complicate stuff with plugins.
Conclusion
Although I am having less and less fun with all this for the moment, I feel I can manage to get something good out of it. If I gave up because of difficulties, I would not have been able to get a Ph.D, to keep my job for more than seven years and to create a modded Minecraft map.