Processor Use

[aklisiewicz]

I want to know if everybody experience this issue.
I have a projects with 10-14 tracks (so basically not many). On those tracks I have some power hungdy devices installed (ie. Omnisphere, Ableton Weave Synth, Serum, and some NI-Reaktor plugins). I also have 2-3 effects on the routed channels. When I open a project and do not do or play anything the processor use is already on 30-35%. Why LIVE uses so much of a processor while nothing is played ? Is there any way to resolve this. With 35% already used when I start playing some of the instruments PC already chokes and I get of course cracking sound and all kind of distortion.
I'm running 6-core I7 processor with 64Gb RAM on GIGABIT mobo and Win10-Pro. It seems that 2-3 years ago when I was running only Win7 and had less powerful PC I did not have that many CPU issues, or at least did not experience them when the sound was not played.I removed pretty much all unnecessary software possibly running in the background (not related to Live).

I wonder if there is any solution to that ?

Would replacing my i7 with i9 or 12-core RYZEN change a lot ?
I'm thinking how much gain would it make to replace it along with new mobo.
Please share how you manage the CPU or if you know any tricks.

ART

[jestermgee]

Depends on the plugins you use.....

If it uses cpu when not playing, chances are you have something like an analog emulation plugin (waves are guilty) which will be trying to process a signal all the time. This is something VST3 may help with but what I would do (since I personally enjoy finding out how things work) would be just start deleting devices until the cpu drops.

Issue isn’t Live

[yur2die4]

There comes a time for balance. It’s either have a lot of CPU intensive devices and increase the audio buffer, or have one or two and set the buffer as low as you can get away with. You can’t have both. And nothing in this current era will fix that.

[aklisiewicz]

So can you tell me more how buffer might affect CPU ? I never have had any time to learn about buffer. I do not have to save on memory as I have plenty of it. I also changed my ASIO buffer size to 1014 samples but I think it is not only a sampled instruments causing this but rather processing. I did some experiment and went through all track turning off devices one by one. The majo CPU drag was caused by REAKTOR (with the its own plugin). No.2 was Ableton Weave Synth, so I really do not understand why Ableton device might cause this (as I have used some factory preset).

Any idea or experience how much would I gain by replaceing my i7 6-core with i9-8-core or AMD equivalent 12-core ?
I'm also thinking about suncing two computers together, but so far not much info on that. The only thing so far I have found was some add-on for Vienna Ensamble but they do not sell this separately and I'm not interested much in muying their Orchestral library just to get thie add-on. To be honest this is something that should be build in into Live. I wonder if I purchased another midi-audio interface and route its outpub to the 1st interface then route the sound from the 1st to the speakers I can get this working (?). Then I could sync the two PCs with hte LAbleton LINK.

ART

[aklisiewicz]

OK, I just did some experimentation and found that:

NI REAKTOR-Prism eats up 20% of the CPU ---- wooow!
I also found that many Ableton FX eat up CPU even if not used (another words they are placed in track but no sound is going through them).
That is no god at all. They do not use much but if you stack them up in different tracks the power adds up duickly. For example 3 Filetered Delays (on separate tracks with different settings) eat up 1%. Reverbs, Echo etc. eat up another chunk etc. Even if one uses sent tracks it will take some CPU power (and I'm not talking about using the CPU when they process the soun but the case when the sound is not going through them).

Amazingly I truned off every instrument, effect and pretty much everything in the project (it is only 10 tracks + 3 sends) and CPU is still on 2% - why ? I have no idea !!! I would say that Ableton should really review this and com out with some solution. On the other hand I think NI instruments (especially REAKTOR) are very inefficient as well.

[miyaru]

I found out the same with Reason's rackplugins in Live Suite. In Reason there is nothing going on cpu wise, but if you load the same plugs in Live..........

I think, and found out Live is CPU hungry on some points, especially for the wavetable synth.

I run my PC with a 4 core/8threads i7-7700 Intel. For all other things a fine hard working PC, for Live it can run out of breath.

[TLW]

So can you tell me more how buffer might affect CPU ? I never have had any time to learn about buffer.

Buffer size generally affects cpu use in that the shorter the buffer the harder the cpu has to work to keep it filled. The quality of the audio driver can affect how hard the cpu has to work to do this as well.

But, and it’s a big but, there are a lot of things going on in a multi-tasking computer (and all modern OSs have to multi-task all the time) that can affect cpu usage and DAW performance. PCs in particular can be prone to problems caused by delayed procedure calls (dpcs) that can make even an otherwise very powerful PC unsuitable for audio or video production. Then there’s the cpu sleep states, power saving settings, core parking..... Macs generally suffer less from that sort of issue, partly because Apple know what is in a Mac and can write their OS largely based on known and fixed hardware, at least for things like the motherboard drivers, video, USB/TB etc. while making provision for third party drivers for things like audio interfaces, MIDI devices and so on. MacOS is also very different to Windows at a low level in the same way Linux is, MacOS being unix, well, FreeBSD, based. I think MS do an amazing job by producing an OS that can cope with maybe millions of different possible hardware combinations, and I used (and built and fought with configuring) Windows DAWs for many years; these days I’m lazy and prefer dealing with Macs.

The reason plugins use resources when there is no audio passing through them is that if they only switch “on” when audio is passing into them there is a possibility they will introduce sudden gain changes in the audio or pops or “hiccups” as the plugin gets up to speed, so DAW designers tend towards letting them run all the time because there’s no way in advance to “warn” a plugin that audio is about to appear so it had better switch itself into active mode now. OK, “look ahead” functions can do this for audio already recorded but they introduce latency equal to the amount of “look ahead” which is not ideal in a live or recording setting. If the DAW is being used for e.g. live clip recording and looping then “look ahead” is useless because the DAW doesn’t know when the user is going to send it some audio to work with. At least, not until someone invents a time machine.

Live is based around being creatively usable in a live performance setting, which means audio glitching, unanticipated leaps in gain/volume, etc. would be a very bad thing indeed, and a stable audio engine is very important. In a performance setting things should work seamlessly and in a way that the user can anticipate. More “traditional” DAWs don’t need to worry so much about that because a click or two or a 20ms silence when a plugin is activated by the user generally doesn’t matter so much in a studio setting. The downside is that Live can be a bit resource hungry sometimes.

[[jur]]

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239381&sid=af882d95 ... 3b43026d48

[zsazsa]

My understanding is that since plugins/ audio software needs to react instantly when a signal/ data is coming in, that they already need to actively do 'their thing' .
If they would not then it would take time to change from a state of doing nothing to executing CPU instructions which would result in drop outs and or sync issues.

At least that is how I imagine it to be...

[aklisiewicz]

In previous LIVE versions there was setting to processor cores. I would like to find out if Live is utilizing my 6-core. This is really wired because today I disabled almost everything. I left SERUM with one custom patch (pads). When I tried to play two notes then change to another 2 notes Pc started chocking on that. It is hard for me to compare (because I purchased lots of new software in a last year) but it seems like I have less processing power (although I use the same PC and even added extra RAM). My AUDIO driver is set to 1024 samples but I think in case of some plugins it is irrelevant (if they do not use samples).
I think I was able to play more tracks simultaneously in the past that I am able today. I wonder if there is any hidden settings.
Another thing that puzzles me is the system monitor. Running Win10 with 64Gig-RAM, I look at LIVE meeter and my Windows10 meeter they are completely off. MY CPU is i7/5820 running 3.5GHz with 6-cores.

I idsabled most of plugins and only have some FX on send tracks. When on idle the CPU shows in Live at 4%. For example I'm playing PAD-Ghostly patch with 3 notes. Live shows 74% and of course tons of crackin, while Win10 monitor shows only 9% CPU usage.
Of course not all Serum patches caus this problem Ibut I think this one is a factory default patch.

What I also noticed is that when I do not puch a computer at all the WIN monitor shows 6% and Live shows 4%, but when I start playing Live is completely off,...

What is going on here ? I wonder if there are any BIOS settings that might affect this sound processing ?

[zsazsa]

This might be helpful:
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sk-Manager

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... ndling-FAQ

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... e-CPU-load

[aklisiewicz]

Thanks for the links.
I did some further testing and DISABLED / ENABLED some settings in the BIOS and noticed no performance difference. One major setting was INTEL MULTITHREADED TECHNOLOGY (which I believed enables multicores in a CPU).

I also tried different audio driver. I use ASIO4ALL and it improved a performance a little but not enough to be satisfied. At this moment then still when playing single SERUM patch and everything else turne of CPU (on Live meter) goes to 80-90% and of course the sound is totall distorted. It sounds OK only when I play 1 note (one key).

[zsazsa]

What samplerate have you set in your preferences?
If you have 96 or 192 kHz then it will help your performance to lower it to 44.1 or 48.
Also increasing the buffer will help. You can do this in the asio4all control panel.

since you are talking about asio4all I assume that you are using your motherboard's soundcard.
Before spending money on a new cpu you might look into getting an external sound card.

I did notice a huge difference in cpu usage when I had my laptop connected to a focusrite Scarlett2i2 gen2 (at 32 samples, very bad performance and very high cpu usage) compared to my RME Babyface (fantastic performance on 48 samples and hardly any cpu usage). I had these low buffers to use it with an e-drum kit which worked like poop with the scarlett

So I would try to find a secondhand RME babyface (pro).

[aklisiewicz]

No you are wrong about my setup. I use a desktop PC running Win10Pro and external (USB3) interface (BEHRINGER UMC-404). I recently updated the driver for that so this also could be a culprit. I would upgrade my interface but only knowing it would help in sound processing. Based on some YT videos the difference with different interfaces is rather unsignificant (upt ot 10%). I do not know why one would assume that ASIO4 ALL is only for laptops (?).
My sample rate in Live is at the lowes (41k)

USB2 or 3 does not really matter as external audio interface transmits only MIDI data which is very low bandwidth.

OK> so I just did another test. Removed all tracks including SENDS. I left one track only with one SERUM preset. When playing more than 4 notes PC completely chockes up and goes (at peak) beyond 94%, so even in this setup something is wrong. I wonder if anybody is using SERUM and could test this preset on his PC and give the results. https://ibb.co/TKchKVp



Here I made a list of the items that possibly affect this:


- BIOS setup (that is something that still need to research more, as there are plenty of settings which I 'm not clear about) . I use GIGABYTE mobo.-
- Audio Ddriver settings (in this case I used ASIO4All with only one channell enabled for my audio interface
- interface itself (I'm thinking about purchasing another interface to see if there is a big difference)
- Live settings
- Serum settings (not really much in the interface but perhaps there are some config files which can be tweaked)
- Windows settings (rather unlikely as I got it setup to highest performance level, with most of the background programs and services disabled).

[zsazsa]

I don't assume asio4all is only for laptops.
I was only sharing my personal experience which involved a laptop.
And in my specific scenario (old laptop, very low buffer size so that I could play e-drums) the soundcard/ driver made a huge difference. Literally the difference between unusable because of continuous dropouts vs totally flawless..

I hope you can sort it out!