macOS Catalina + Live 10 Issues: Core Library and GUI Lags

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benmuetsch
Posts: 13
Joined: Wed Sep 28, 2011 8:45 pm

macOS Catalina + Live 10 Issues: Core Library and GUI Lags

Post by benmuetsch » Tue Nov 09, 2021 10:18 am

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing two issues with Ableton Live 10 Suite and macOS Catalina, both running the latest build / update respectively.

First: Ableton Live tends to lose / forget it's Core Library sometimes when directly opening existing project files. Then the two browser registers "Instruments" and "Audio Effects" are completely empty, but already instantiated "stock plugins/instruments" load fine and can be copied over to new tracks. The workaround is to always start Live 10 without opening a project, then the Core Library is there or at least gets re-scanned after the main Live window appears. Not a really big issue, but somehow strange. 3rd party plugins and additional Live Packs are always there and never missing.

Second: there are still GUI lags unfortunately, which got already described here in the forum if I remember correctly . I just recently upgraded from macOS Sierra, where I never experienced these lags. First upgraded to Mojave, where I felt it was even worse, then went on and did a clean-install of Catalina.
I also notice slight CPU usage spikes when these lags happen and I even had the case, where an recording got corrupted during one of those lags, which is really annoying. I do voice recording sometimes for clients and it's really uncomfortable to tell the speaker that some words got corrupted, because your DAW was freezing for 2 seconds.

My setup is:

Mac Pro 6-Core Intel Xeon 3.46GHz
24GB Ram
nVidia GeForce GTX 660 1,5GB VRAM running two external Displays via HDMI / DVI
Universal Audio Apollo Firewire

Ableton Live is running from fast internal 1TB NVMe system drive (more than enough free space left) and installed in default location.
Usually using buffer size of 256 or even 512 in larger projects, nothing too fancy.

All fresh and clean install of macOS and all Plugins, no cracks of anything, everything is up to date. Besides Live and Plugins, there are only little programs installed on the computer, like Firefox, Garageband, iLok License Manager, RoomEQ Wizard, NI Native Access and so on... as little as possible.

Thanks for any help, ideas or suggestions.

Best regards from Stuttgart, Germany,

Ben :-)

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