Ableton Live Can't Load Driver

[arraybercov]

When selecting the Synchronous driver in Ableton Win64 it says:

The device only has input channels. Live only supports audio devices that have at least one stereo output.

Then the driver fails to load.

Any ideas?

[MSM792]

I had a similar issue with Studio One. I think this was due to the previous configuration being incompatible with Studio One (probably because there haven't been any outputs configured). Anyway, Studio One would not load the SynchronousAudioRouter driver and therefore wouldn't allow me to open the control panel. My solutions to this was to delete the folder %AppData%\SynchronousAudioRouter. After that the driver loaded and I could start over with the configuration.

[dreamcat4]

Suggested solution did not work for me. Same error msg repeat even after deleting the AppData subfolder. Didn't close ableton live 9. Didnt restart win10.

This was with SAR v0.13 and win10 build 15063. And Ableton launched either with or without admin privelidges.... didnt matter.

[paulheu]

Install Reaper to verify SAR is installed and working correctly

[dreamcat4]

@paulheu yes reaper did allow me to select SAR in its options page. And access the SAR control panel from there. I created 2x pairs of stereo output channels within SAR config.

However I had a couple of other issues over there while trying to setup reaper. Firstly it didnt list the SAR channels i had just created them in the repear's main output list. The main options page of reaper only permitted me to select my 'real' 2 'SDIF digital autio out' windows playback channels in the 'select output first-last' drop-down lists. My ultimate goal was to send audio simultaneously to 2 other analogue playback output channels at the same time. 'to make my own 4.0, and send the front/back into 2 different real soundcards'. Well to reaper all of the system analog channels were missing... it only say digital channels. Ok well maybe i just dont understand how to use the reaper yet. Or how to achieve my goal. Or its something which SAW+reaper alone cannot solve for me here...

Anyhow those speculartions didnt really seem to matter. Because shortly after going back to the main window... well reaper crashed pretty soon after that. Didn't even get do anything with it! 0 plugins installed or anything else. Latest version of reaper. This felt like a really unstable software to me compared to Ableton, which is rock solid.

[UPDATE] - ah. Maybe I forgot to start reaper with admin priviledges? Cannot remember now. Will go back and repeat steps / try again making sure its running as 'admin'.

Then I tried installing jack instead. Which didn't get me anywhere either, perhaps because [unlike reaper] it seemed like nothing from SAR appeared to register in jack, when launching 'jackd.exe'. But it could have been for some other reason, for example me not providing the correct cmdline arguments for the name of the device for Jack to find SAR. And since... dont actually know anything about how to successfully use jack, and have had 0 success (so far) understanding what to try with it. Difficult / tough by comparison, and comes with its own bugs / idiosynchosies, etc. Couldnt figure out even the first thing that was going on in there.

If you have any specific advice or insight, or recommendations, or tutorials, that you believe will help me towards my goal, then please let me know. Would very much appreciate that. I googled etc. about how to 'make your own surround' (but split across multiple output devices), in windows and none of the solutions actually seemed to even aim to 'solve' this specific problem. I suppose on MacOS would be trying to do this all with the utility 'soundflower', and to create a virtual device in it. Am I on the wrong track here, for win10?

[dreamcat4]

OK reaper is now launched (as admin). And now I try creating a SAR input device too. Which appears in reaper output channel section. This is progress! Unfortunately only 1x windows 'selected default playback' device can be selected in reaper device output. And windows audio drivers only lets audio get output to 1 selected 'default device' at any one time. Afaikt this is a limitation of windows driver audio stack / audio system. But I really would like to find the way to get around it.

For example if my back surround channels are piped into the SAR input, maybe that can be linked using jackd.exe to a different [real] other windows playback device. That is not the currently selected 'default playback device'. Then I can be sending surround audio channels, and can put together my own 'ad-hoc surround'. Which is my ultimate goal.

Or maybe I can simultaneously run 2 different DAW software. With 'daw A' outputting to 'real audio playback device A'. And 'daw B' outputting to 'real audio playback device B'. Or this is what 2 instances of jackd.exe can do with the right flags.

Also new issue now with win10. Is that whenever I ltry aunch reaper as 'admin'... well the explorer.exe crashes every other (alternate time). And reaper doesn't get started. That is some other bug. So to launch reaper once requires me to launch it twice. And get past that initial crashing.

OK so now the SAR created inputs and outputs are both showing up in the Reaper main options page. And can be included in the available inputs-outputs channels device ranges. However when I click 'OK' to save options.... reaper just crashes again anyway. Therefore reaper its still really unstable for me here on windows 10. When I click 'debug', the 'reaper' crash seemed to occured in a windows audio dll (api call) being used by reaper:

https://i.imgur.com/JSyJivR.png

I guess then (for those other problems encountered elsewhere)... its still really nice alternative to have SAR working for Ableton too. It is useful 2nd program to see / compare and identify if a bug or problem is either in the DAW, or is in SAR, or in windows 10 audio drivers stack.

Hence this ticket.

[dreamcat4]

Ah okay!

Then going to reaper is a work-around. We just added some virtual devices from launching SAR config in reaper, then exit reaper. Or reaper just crashes anyhow (whatever, it doesnt matter). Now I can launch ableton, and it no longer complains! The error message is gone, because SAR has got some ins/outs now!

This is great. Another thing though: the daw is spinning wheel now. For example after saving the SAR config. Or selecting 'input channels' and 'output channels'. A toast notification comes up for 'ASIO v2'. Saying the audio mode or whatever. And then its spinning wheel in Ableton. What is better: it isnt full out crashing (seem Ableton is too good for that, and has some way to recover itself). But its definately hanging for several seconds at these times. Still buggy / problems occur, which is not the fault of the DAW it seems. Because its bugging out in the same place, with 2 different DAWs. So then: win10 build 15063 and SAR + ASIO4ALLv2 together is not playing so well....

Maybe I should see if there is an update for ASIO4ALLv2... nope its the newest version (23 May 2017: Version 2.14).

[jontzi]

@dreamcat4 could you send your Ableton compatible default.json config file from %appdata%\SynchronousAudioRouter folder? i think issue with Ableton is that the default config is not compatible with Ableton and you need to use other DAW to config it first as Reaper seems to ignore lack of audio channels configured by default. :)

[jontzi]

@dreamcat4 nevermind, got it working by doing setup via Reaper first :)

here's working config for ableton (insert in %APPDATA%\SynchronousAudioRouter\default.json file):

{ "applications": [ { "description": "Ableton", "path": "C:\\ProgramData\\Ableton\\Live 9 Suite\\Program\\Ableton Live 9 Suite.exe" } ], "driverClsid": "{429A7462-F176-411F-8DA9-AE6C0A258098}", "enableApplicationRouting": true, "endpoints": [ { "channelCount": 2, "description": "", "id": "ep_1", "type": "playback" }, { "channelCount": 2, "description": "", "id": "ep_2", "type": "recording" } ] }

[r0zar]

FIX FOR ABLETON USERS:

1. Close Ableton
2. Rename your %APPDATA%\SynchronousAudioRouter\default.json to defaultx.json
3. Start Ableton and load the driver again.

basically it's get into a bad state and needs to be reset. cheers!