Ableton Forum

...and I was pretty shocked.

Firstly, I've always been an ableton evangelist. I don't think ableton can be beaten on ease of use and simplicity. I teach it to students and always recommend it. But working on any large project has become such a chore in Live 9, and a finished mix is almost impossible - I get massive audio dropouts, my cpu and disk usage meters are always too high. I bounce, I freeze...everything I try doesn't really help. When you're at these final mix stages, Live is completely unresponsive, and its definitely worse in Live 9. From what I can tell (on a mac) Ableton has really shitty performance. I cant even find a pattern to the performance issues since I switched to Live 9 - there will be hours where ableton seems unusable (Im guessing its indexing?) and then these issues dissapear...Im on a quad core i7 mac with a brand new SSD - there's nothing wrong with my machine's specs.

Today I bounced a 50 track project that I have to make some edits to - I rendered each track as a 24bit wav as ableton couldn't handle the load with plugins. Then I reimported into a session. I got playback skips from disk usage (warping was off), random CPU spikes...everything Im used to.
I also decided to load these same files into Presonus Studio One, of which I have no experience. Straight away I noticed the difference - no disk playback issues at all. Cpu at 2%. So I started loading plugins and mixing. I was able to use so many plugins - big ones like Ozone - without a problem. The interface was fast & responsive, unlike Ableton which feels sluggish. Even the meters and spectrographs play back smoother. The performance was so unbelievably different to Ableton.

I only write this post because I WISH ableton could fix these issues, and I wonder if other mac users have these issues. I'd rather just stay in Ableton - it would be faster and cheaper than getting and learning a new program.

Royalston wrote:I wonder if other mac users have these issues. I'd rather just stay in Ableton - it would be faster and cheaper than getting and learning a new program.

no, I've never experienced anything like you describe. are you using a separate hard disk for your audio files ?

Royalston wrote:...and I was pretty shocked.

Firstly, I've always been an ableton evangelist. I don't think ableton can be beaten on ease of use and simplicity. I teach it to students and always recommend it. But working on any large project has become such a chore in Live 9, and a finished mix is almost impossible - I get massive audio dropouts, my cpu and disk usage meters are always too high. I bounce, I freeze...everything I try doesn't really help. When you're at these final mix stages, Live is completely unresponsive, and its definitely worse in Live 9. From what I can tell (on a mac) Ableton has really shitty performance. I cant even find a pattern to the performance issues since I switched to Live 9 - there will be hours where ableton seems unusable (Im guessing its indexing?) and then these issues dissapear...Im on a quad core i7 mac with a brand new SSD - there's nothing wrong with my machine's specs.

Today I bounced a 50 track project that I have to make some edits to - I rendered each track as a 24bit wav as ableton couldn't handle the load with plugins. Then I reimported into a session. I got playback skips from disk usage (warping was off), random CPU spikes...everything Im used to.
I also decided to load these same files into Presonus Studio One, of which I have no experience. Straight away I noticed the difference - no disk playback issues at all. Cpu at 2%. So I started loading plugins and mixing. I was able to use so many plugins - big ones like Ozone - without a problem. The interface was fast & responsive, unlike Ableton which feels sluggish. Even the meters and spectrographs play back smoother. The performance was so unbelievably different to Ableton.

I only write this post because I WISH ableton could fix these issues, and I wonder if other mac users have these issues. I'd rather just stay in Ableton - it would be faster and cheaper than getting and learning a new program.

I'm on Pc
I also have all these problems in large projects. I hope that Bitwig will be stable with a project that has more than 50 tracks .

Guy Smiley - I have both - the 50 rendered tracks was on an external HD . Normally my projects sit on the same disk as samples.

Royalston wrote:Guy Smiley - I have both - the 50 rendered tracks was on an external HD . Normally my projects sit on the same disk as samples.

sounds like a dodgy plugin ?
or an iffy soundcard driver ?
Never had anything like the problems you're experiencing. Have you tried (temporarily) disabling 3rd party plugins ?
I note that you're freezing / bouncing. By default Live often does this into the project folder, which depending on your setup may be on your local hardrive ?

I get this a lot mostly be cause of specific plugins like Maschine and Ozone 5. Spotlight can be adding to the issue.

I just tried Presonus Studio One, their free one-month trail. But only after I'd downloaded it was it made clear that the "integrated" Melodyne was not available as part of the one-month trial. I called them, no dice. Didn't say so on their website though. So I'd wasted my time and put a bunch of crap on my drive for nothing. And that was the very reason I wanted to try it: Melodyne integration.

Looks like a nice program, but I'm not able to evaluate it. I'm sure it has its problems too.

When you loaded the bounced tracks into Studio One, where were the files saved? On the same external drive? While this might not explain the extent of your experiences, I do find that my drives getting up to speed is the bottle neck for my results.

Presonus is good, but.
when you play with a hardware midi device, there is a problem.
Sometimes you want to specify a parameter, for example msb/lsb/program change. They have a knob of scale 1 to 100. If I need to switch on the specific program (let us say 112), I need to do a very sophisticated calculations

I love Studio One. I still use Live more often for my own music these days, but for larger projects or client mixdowns it's ace. As an alternative to Live for certain tasks, can't recommend it enough.

Is your SSD internal or external?

External HHD(even if SSD) can bottle neck alot easier then internal drives.

Im betting your issue is related with disc overload.

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If you want a very light hosts for heavy plug in use in Mix/mastering stages you should also check reaper.

yeah, but it doesn't sound as good as bitwig.

login wrote:If you want a very light hosts for heavy plug in use in Mix/mastering stages you should also check reaper.

I think that Reaper is best DAW till this day. It has so many great features in only 10mb of instalation, but it is so user unfrendly and complicated.