hi, I have a crack of Ableton first off, and for some reason, whenever i try playing a track from start to finish/rendering it out, and exactly at the drop, audio cuts out and if i try pausing it and playing it over, it still doesn't work. i've been debugging/diagnosing the problem for a full day and nothing has shown up except a possible memory leak. i tried restarting my macbook pro, same issue arises. can someone help me

ableton 12.1.1
macOS sequoia 15.1.1

 

i'm not running Ableton. But think about your problem in a more basic way. When your track drops, it is the loudest spot of your track. If you are spiking the main output to where it is clipping, you can get something that seems like this. So turn it all completely down and see if you can play past that point.

After that, you have to look at each individual plugin you have become active at the drop too. Either audio or midi data is hitting a new plugin at that spot, and then causing your problem. Play your project back with all channels disabled, and add them back one at a time until you duplicate your problem.

It's probably a plugin causing your problem. It's something happening in your project at that point in your timeline. The problem is likely not your DAW or a memory leak, because that would not be a predictable point in your timeline where you will see it occur. It would be anywhere. Test in another project.

 

Last edited: Dec 3, 2024

Options/Preferences/Audio tab


Hit the 'test tone' button and adjust the 'audio output' until you hear no artifacts .

Then go and try again and see if the problem has gone. It could be something else, but that would be my first port of call.

+1 yep, my thoughts too.

 

Last edited: Dec 3, 2024

If you don't want to move the levels of your mix to screw around testing, slap the God Particle in the last slot on the master. Kind of funny, but it is like a stock adaptive limiter.

 

If you have an issue sussing out the problem plugin as pointed out above, create a new session, navigate to the problem session file from lives browser, and one by one import each track into the new session by dragging it onto the empty space in arrangement view. when you import the problem track, it will crash live, alerting you that you have an issue with the plugins on that track.