Ableton's Learn Live series breaks down two audio preferences that directly affect how smoothly your sessions run: buffer size and sample rate. Both settings live in Live's Audio Preferences, and both involve tradeoffs worth understanding before you hit record.
Buffer size controls how much audio your computer processes at once. Too low and you get dropouts; too high and you introduce latency when monitoring or recording. The practical fix most producers use is to drop the buffer size when recording or performing live, then raise it during mixing. The sweet spot for most machines sits between 128 and 1024 samples.
Sample rate determines how many audio slices per second your computer captures or plays back. A higher rate costs more CPU, but it doesn't automatically improve sound quality. If your samples were recorded at 48k, running Live at 96k won't make them sound better, it just forces Live to do extra conversion work. The key rule: match Live's sample rate to the sample rate of your source audio, and set it no lower than 44.1k.