Redundant Playback Sync Issues

Hey all! dropped an email to Leo, but wanted to see if you all have experienced this also! I’m chasing an issue with my redundant setup using Ablest. I’m hoping it’s just me being dumb and not having a feature turned on or sync’d or something. I’ll bullet point the symptoms below to try and keep this short:

SETUP: 2020 Intel MBP & 2021 M1 MBP

OS: Both on 14.7.2

Ableton: Both running 11.3.35

Ableset: Both running 2.7.4

Playaudio1U for redundant playback

Host Controller: Akai LPD8 (both ableset instances have identical controller mappings for play, stop, next etc)

Ablenet running over wireless closed network (I know this isn’t ideal)

Ablest interaction - Browser via “OPEN ABLESET” button from menu dropdown

SETLIST: Ableton project was copied to B computer right before this test so I have 99% certainty the projects are identical

Main Symptom: When I begin playback with controller everything seems to work fine. However my B computer at some point will lose its connection and have to re-negotiate with Ableton, thus causing it to become completely out of sync with computer A. It seems as though if I let each song simply run its course, and ONLY go from one some to the next I stand a better chance at not having this issue occur. When it does occur it takes it about 20 seconds to re-connect, and then technically once I hit “next” for the next song it’s essentially back in sync. But I absolutely cannot rely on a 50/50 shot that one or two of the songs in the set will go completely out of sync and just hope that’s not the song a failure on A computer occurs.

NOTE: my “jump mode” on both computers is set to “end of song” so when I want to skip a couple songs I’ll “next” down to the song I want. Because this was a test, I STOP playback which forces the jump in ablest down to the next song, then I hit play. THIS series of events seems to pretty reliably trigger the “reconnection” on B computer. Not sure if that’s helpful or not.

(VID 3 - shows this issue replicated)

Secondary Symptom: With computers linked via able net I can scroll on laptop A’s setlist and pick a song. It then brings up the same song on Computer B, however it seems as if computer B’s playhead in Ableton is NOT moving based on the selection made from ablest on computer A. Ablest on Computer B shows the same song gets pulled up and when I hit play, playback begins, but Ableton’s playhead on computer B is at a completely different spot and plays a completely different song. The workaround for this is to completely unlink ablest but killing wifi on one machine and whenever I want to jump down the set list I have to do it on the two computers completely independent of each other, then when ableset has the song pulled on correctly on both computer the controler will begin playback. This is kind of like a “dumb” redundant setup with the manual work of having to pull up the song on both computers independently.

NOTE: I’ve noticed that I don’t need to have able net enabled for the ablest instances on both computers to recognize when I click a song name via computer A. This is probably my newbie understanding haha, so maybe this isn’t an able net issue?

(VID 3 @ 2:55 starts to show this issue VID 4 continues to show this issue)

VIDEOS & Log files LINK: Dropbox

Hey @mattjvisuals,

Thank you for the elaborate description and the files!

One thing I noticed looking at your videos is that the session is very zoomed-out on your B machine. This has a huge impact on Ableton Live in large projects and can cause the UI thread, which the AbleSet plugin also runs on, to become unresponsive for a few hundred milliseconds at a time.

I saw this in your log files as well:

I’m not sure if this will fix all issues, but could you try zooming in your arrangement view, so you have maybe one or two songs visible at a time and check if that improves the stability?

Maybe I should add a feature that notifies you when it notices the connection to Live becoming unstable and offers help to improve the situation.

I hope this helps and look forward to your reply! :slight_smile:

@leolabs thank you for this! Never would have thought of it. I’ll give it a try in the next couple weeks. I’ve built a 16 song 1 hour set for a specific show coming up and that has run pretty flawlessly in rehearsal so far! So it makes sense it could be our 100+ song session. That feature you mentioned would be awesome! Could you elaborate on the zoom view btw? Zooming doesn’t affect CPU usage much at all so it sounds like there’s another thread somewhere being utilized by ableset also that’s causing the lag notifications I. The log?

Just adding one more tip here. One of my bands uses one large project with all of our material and multiple versions/medleys of some songs; our project is 15GB and 24 hours long (yes, I realize that is totally crazy). AbleSet works SO well at managing all of this.
Two things I have to do to make sure playback is smooth due to a GUI issue in Live: 1) zooming in a good bit as Leo described (so only a song or two are visible at one time)
2) scrolling down in Arrangement view to the bottom of that window (where I mostly have busses without any audio files).
If I’m scrolled up with the majority of my audio channels visible, I can get playback issues (usually first noticed as lagging video output).

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Thanks for the tips, @patvalley! :slight_smile:

@mattjvisuals if I understand correctly, Live uses two threads – one for audio and one for everything else, like rendering the UI, control surface scripts, etc. This means that if the UI becomes unresponsive, audio will continue to play without interruptions.

The CPU meter in Live only shows how much of the audio thread is being used.

Got it! That makes sense. Back home next week I’ll update this thread when I test our main large project zoomed in!

Perfect, I’m looking forward to your feedback! :slight_smile: