5 midi tracks and cpu's maxing out?

[DjViral]

hi running live 7.0.18 on macbook intel core duo 2ghz, 2 gigs of ram, leopard 10.5.8, and with just 5 midid tracks maybe 4 vst or au effects on each the cpu's just maxing out and getting so crackly, even trying to arrange a song it just caan't do it, it snuts i always have to export just to even hear what im doing, so annoying. anyone know a solution please??? my audio buffer size is 2048 samples, maxed!! and i even have driver error compensation on to max, and still doesnt help. cpu% simulator at 80%!!. whats! going on??

[Hermanus]

have you tried with frozen tracks, it can really relieve some cpu pressure.

Weird behavior for 7.0.18

By the way, which soundcard do you use? driver / coreaudio?

[ark]

What synths? Some of Ableton's synths use much more cpu than others.

[Tamar UK]

Are you using built in soundcard?
Just a thought but my performance on my Toshiba laptop was appaling with ableton until i tried a dedicated soundcard.
Even when registering 10% cpu load, i got crackles and dropouts all over the place.

[HeadrickProductions]

What synths? Some of Ableton's synths use much more cpu than others.

really??

they seemed pretty cpu friendly compared to massive and other synths I've tried but I only played with the demo for 30 days???

[DjViral]

im using coreaduio right now, i have a external tascam us 122L but don't use it cause it makes no difference. i know soundcard matters, maybe i need a better one?

and i can't freeze the tracks beause they have external routing so the sidechaining compressor. kind of a lame feature when it you cant route any of the audio anywhere...

[Tone Deft]

Viral- the CPU meter is a little misunderstood. there's the entire CPU load then there's the CPU time left over after your OS and other apps take its time. Live's CPU meter measures how much of that left over CPU power is left. if you have an app running in the background that takes 75% of the CPU, Live will not reflect that.

just something to consider when looking at CPU loads that's not real obvious.

[ark]

What synths? Some of Ableton's synths use much more cpu than others.

really??

Really. In particular, Tension and Collision use quite a bit of cpu.

[DjViral]

no i know i close evry program even run activity monitor and close little things that take up cpu, even shutdown my dashboard with a prgram. iunno its just really slow, you thin the ram matters, i mean 2 gigs sholdnt be this bad. maybe a new soundcard, maybe firewire this time instead of usb, any good ones?

[doghouse]

I doubt it's the soundcard...my MacBook doesn't really use less CPU using my Firewire interface vs.built in audio. I've never needed buffers above 128 samples, either.

Tell us exactly what plugins you are using. Some FX processors are very CPU intensive.

[DjViral]

k well track i ahve going now,

track 1: synth : Discovery , effects: compressor(sidechaining), ambience (reverb), and an ableton arpegiattor

track 2 : synth 2 : Monopoly, effects: "" same as above.

track 3: drums: drum rack, effects: Decapitator, 3 Filterfreaks, 1 audio effect rack( chemical drum assault), ambience (reverb), and psp mixsaturator

track 4: just audio of the kick for sidechaining. re-recorded the kick (so not using another drum track with all those fx) alot of cpu if so.

track 5: bass: monopoly, effects: arpeggiator, vinyl distortion, cabinet effect, and two ableton compressors. thats about it.

it even starts skipping if its like the intro and only two of those tracks are playing.

[Tone Deft]

does your hard drive indicator blink? it's the D at the upper right of the GUI.

edit probably not, looks like mostly midi.

[DjViral]

does your hard drive indicator blink? it's the D at the upper right of the GUI.

edit probably not, looks like mostly midi.

no no blinking D, i have had that in the past. my mac harddrive has about 15 gigs of space, if that matters, maybe need more space? and im accessing my projects on an external usb drive that just runs off usb, could that be a problem? obviously all my plugins are on my computer though, but sample and such are on external.

[Tone Deft]

drive space, another good point! 15Gb should be fine. I get nervous at 1Gb but I've read here it's more like a percentage of the drive you want free, 10% I think. has to do with the drive spinning around.

2Gb of RAM is fine, IMO, you don't want less.

maybe start a set in Live 7, benchmark it then try it in Live 8?

[doghouse]

The best way I know how to debug CPU load issues is to disable elements of a track (i.e. turn off some of the FX) and see how the load changes.

-- When you wrote Monopoly, do you mean the Korg Legacy plugin? That one burns a lot of CPU compared to some other softsynths.

-- The heavy processing on the drum track would also be a place to look carefully.

-- What reverb plug are you using? Reverbs can be real CPU hogs.

-- Look at your "cabinet effect", the amp modelers I've tried all use a lot of CPU.