anybody using Live with ancient computer

[oneummon]

Lot's of talking about quad cores and 64bits - Just out of curiosity, how many of you are using Live successfully
with at least five years old computer? I'm working with first generation macbook and it's running wild! Lot's of freezing though.
There's always workaround to be found if cpu hits 100%...

[pepezabala]

I have a 2ghz macbook and I hate the fact that I run into cpu-limits so often. I am sooooo close to buying a quadcore macbook pro. if it wasn't so expensive ...

[sabiwa]

Same here. It'd be convenient to have latest hardware at your finger tips, still a limited setup is not an excuse for making things happen. I can wait one more year...

[kennsore]

Hi,

I sold my 2Ghz 2008 MacBook (not ancient) a few weeks ago and bought a brand new 15" MacBook Pro. On the old computer I would hit 60% or more CPU load on my most common setup pretty quickly, and I would have to start freezing tracks. That doesn't happen on the new computer. The strange thing is, my music isn't improving...

It has not made any improvement on stability issues with IK Multimedia plugins either.

[Cezband]

I got a middle-range (at the time), non-music-specific Samsung laptop about 3 years ago because it was all I could afford. All the freezing / flattening is a pain, but in some ways I'm glad because the limitations have helped me to focus specifically on what I want to do to my sounds during the learning process. I think if I'd had a mega-powerful computer during my first steps, I would have gotten used to dumping chain upon chain of effect racks on my tracks without thinking about if they were really necessary.

[oneummon]

the limitations have helped me to focus specifically on what I want to do to my sounds

This is so true

[andydes]

I got as far as live 8 on a 3.0 pentium 4. Could handle pretty big drum racks and plenty of audio tracks plus maybe 4 to 6 tracks of live instruments and effects before I needed to start freezing. Tension killed it quickest.

My live computer at the time was a 1.8 G4 powerbook. Ran 8 tracks audio plus live effects. Used occasionally for sketching ideas, but struggled with more than 2 or 3 instruments.

Both now replaced.

[Khazul]

My co-producer is using an old 15" MBP with Live 7 - one that still had an express card slot in it - cant remember which year it was - has to be 4+ years old by now.

Live generally runs quite well (certainly well enough to play a live set off it), he uses trillian, omnisphere and stylus rmx quite a bit as the most CPU/memory hungry plugins, but not much in the way of fx plugins (2c audio breeze is about the most CPU intensive). He tends to depend on whats in the synths and leaves me to do the mixing and heavy processing on one of my high end machines.

He main problem with the thing is I think HD access seems to be slower than it should be when runniing Live (even if its only first gen SATA), though when Ive tested it with large file copies, it seems OK. It could be that Live's file i/o management is just really bad at times (I know for tested fact that some of the less important bits have trully terrible performance compared to what could be acheived with even semi decently written code.)

TBH its becomming a bit of a struggle for him and probably going to get one of the new 2011 MBP 15" rather than trying to optimise it after hes seen how rediculously faster my 2.3GHz 2011 MBP 17 is. The main thing that will give him is reliable low latency use of NI guitar rig as hes primarily a guitarist. Probably going to replace his FF400 with a babyface as well just to improve overall portability of his rig.

Anyway, given how old the machine is, I think its still a perfectly viable machine for DJ type use. He want to sell it, but I suggested he might just keep it as a low risk/low value live play machine for circumstances where we might not want one of our way our expensive machines to be taken (beach bars/clubs in ibiza/spain for eg = lots of sand/dust around etc and high ambient temperature - really not a good environment for an MBP...).