Why does Ableton shut off all other sound on my computer?

I used to be able to run Ableton and Chrome at the same time. And say, I wanted to listen to a particular riff from a song and try to adapt that into my mix, I could listen to it and play along at the same time.

But I had to wipe my hard drive recently and had to reinstall Ableton, and now I can't for the life of me figure out why when Ableton is running, I can't listen to anything or play anything else.

I'm using the ASIO4All sound card in Ableton preferences, I have a Razer Kraken headset with the Razer Synapse audio manager, but my playback devices say I'm getting sound only from Realtek High Definition Audio.

I have an MSI Z170A motherboard, 16gb of ram and i5-6600k processor.

Is there like a universal sound card besides ASIO that can manage all my sound output? I don't get why I don't have enough power to be able to play and make music in Ableton while being able to play something else.

(I also stream and not being able to listen to my stream to check the sound levels and such while Ableton is open is also extremely frustrating)

Edit: I should also mention that every time when I'm done with Ableton I have to go into Playback Devices and change the default playback and change it back so I can do anything else that involves sound

Posted May 29, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC · edited

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