Live 2.0 and OS X

Tobie · Post by **Tobie** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 12:14 pm

I have just set up the downloadable free update to Live 2.0 for recent purchasers of Live 1.5. and installed it on my iBook 700MHz / 640 M RAM

The demo Live set works great on my OS 9.2.2, even with a couple more effects (I added 3-4 reverbs just to check) and a lot more samples, but it just totally overloads my CPU in OS X.2.3 !!!!

When playing the demo live set without adding any effects or samples, there's allready tones of audio artefacts and distortion running around, and I crashed my iBook just by adding a reverb!

When opening live, without opening any session or anything, Live's CPU meter announces a CPU use of 3%, whilst my Apple CPU utiliy advises LIVE is allready using about 40% of the CPU, WITHOUT RUNNING ANY AUDIO!!!

Is my Live OS X version corrupted? Is there something I do wrong? (I'm not very familiar with the OSX audio capabilities as all my audio softs are still running on OS 9 at the moment.)

I also noticed HUGE Latency issues in OS X when using a MIDI OXYGEN 8 keyboard...

Any one experienced such issues with OS X?

Ableton Team: is this normal?

Apart from that, I must say, Live is one of the most incredible piece of software I ever used, and I am more than happy with my OS 9 version. It does way more and way better than anything I could possibly imagine!!!!!

Thanks Ableton!

Regards,

Tobie

psi · Post by **psi** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 4:18 pm

experienceing several problems also....cpu useage and "spikes" of 75-85%

audio slowing down....

system crash whenever recording live input unable to recover just crashes again..

powerbook 667 and osx 10.2.3

jido-genshi · Post by **jido-genshi** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 4:28 pm

Unfortunately I too am having many problems with Live 2.0 under OS X.2.3. I can have no clips loaded yet in the Session, no effects and just click on a folder in the browser and Live crashes! This never happened in Live 1.5 or in OS X.1.5

Also have extreamly sluggish performance which I never had before (using NO effects!) and audio drop out. I'm on a 667MHz TiBook with 512MB of Ram and no other applications running... should be more than enough.

I don't know if this is due to Live 2.0, or OS X.2.3 or the combination of both, but it's REALLY annoying!

Hope somebody can help... (and none of this, "well use OS 9.2.2" or "use a PC" crap!)

:: genshi ::

filarion · Post by **filarion** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 4:38 pm

everything same as always in osx here, using a powerbook 800 with 1 gig ram and rme multiface/cardbus beta5 drivers. using the live 2.0 demos (which I just now looked at for the first time, a lot nicer than the old ones!) I get performance in the 30s-40s tops, 10% when idle. CPU meter shows that the "system" (red) load hovers around the same percentages. with "nice" cpu usage the meter is close to 100%, but I haven't seen any slowdowns because of that. performance isn't up there with os9 yet, but then, Logic's isn't either and those guys really should be able to tweak every iota of power out of osx.

as a comparison, logic 5.5 plat with my autoload.lso uses about 25% system and and another 25% nice performance when idle.

even Chimera 0.6 uses 15% "red" cpu power.

twelve · Post by **twelve** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 5:09 pm

basically having no difference from live 1.5 on live 2 in os x (like filarion it starts at 10% and goes to about 40%) except an annoying bug in which i cannot record something and play the clip right away with the music going - i have to stop everything and then it will work.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 8:50 pm

(and none of this, "well use OS 9.2.2" or "use a PC" crap!)

...

k

jido-genshi · Post by **jido-genshi** » Fri Dec 27, 2002 12:33 am

But again, to filarion and twelve, are you using OS X.1.5 or X.2 (Jaguar) because I just updated to Jaguar and ALL of my music apps run much slower including Live, Reason, etc.

by the way, My cpu meter in Live hardley goes beyond 23% and I'm STILL getting slowdown in audio and crashes left and right! Never did before Jaguar or before Live 2.0 (did in the beta of 2.0 with OS X.1.5 but I though that was because it was still in beta...two days later it's released with the same bugs and yes I reported them with my log file.)

Still a great product, just should have to save after evry little minor change I make in fear of a crash, and definately no longer smooth enough to use in a performance situation which is why I purchased it.

:: genshi ::

filarion · Post by **filarion** » Fri Dec 27, 2002 12:37 am

I'm using OSX 10.2.3, no Live crash here so far.

twelve · Post by **twelve** » Fri Dec 27, 2002 3:33 am

i am running 10.2.2 i believe and am able to play about 16 clips at once before funky stuff starts happening (around 35%, some effects usually eq). i record all my own samples into live either by instrument or by rewire. i have experienced a couple of bugs:

1) the recover save does not work, crashes live

2) i have to (master) stop and record a clip i just recorded otherwise a crash

Tobie · Post by **Tobie** » Sat Dec 28, 2002 5:57 am

I'm a bit ashamed of admitting that... but as I said earlier... I'm not very familiar with OSX... increazing buffer size solved my problem... the soft is now fully usable under OS X!

Shame on me!!

Post by **Alex** » Sun Dec 29, 2002 4:26 am

Hi Tobie,

nice to hear that it worked now.

But what is with the crash of the reverb ("I crashed my iBook just by adding a reverb")? Is it also fixed? Normally it should not depended on the buffer size.

Btw: Just a note for all the OS X user. Please have in mind that one of the nice features of OS X is the generating of crash logs if a program crashed.
So if you get a crash, feel free to send me this crash log together with the Live log file and a short describtion what you did to get the crash. This is mostly very helpful for us.

regards,
Alex

ZeroAltitude · Post by **ZeroAltitude** » Sun Dec 29, 2002 7:42 am

Live is awesome on account of it being so user-friendly. Macheads don't always know about log files, log locations, etc. Even XP, with its focus on user-friendliness, doesn't require users to know such things.

I believe it would be possible to have Live send the email itself, containing any relevant log files (system dependent, I know -- but you probably already live with branching code anyway). How, you might ask, would Live do that, when by definition, it just crashed?

The answer is: it would do it when it started next. Of course, it would prompt the user if it was OK to do this. Of course, there would be a preference that disabled the feature entirely, and this preference would default to disabled. But, still easier to ask your benevolent beta testers to enable a preference, than to find the logs.

I am aware there are some tricks. What if the network is down for sending the email? What email server should I use? Etc. Etc. But maybe these are preferences, too.

At any rate, *I* thought it would be neat

-Zero

indreamstudio · Post by **indreamstudio** » Thu Jan 02, 2003 4:33 am

Even though my audio buffer is set to the max that Live 2.0.1 allows (1152?)- I get massive audio dropouts, which do not occur using the same arrange under OS X 10.2.3 and Live 1.5.2. I tested this with both my MOTU 828 and MOTU 896- latest December drivers. Same deal.

I need a stable platform for performance which uses both of my G4 533 CPU's so I'd prefer to use X than OS 9.

But like the initial Logic 5 release which didn't perform nearly as optimal as their update for dual-processor mac's and Altivec- I'm hoping the wizards at Ableton are improving their engines performance for the next update?? : ) Until then- I'm having to use 1.5.2 despite spending the cash for the 2.01 update.

Also- why does Live limit the audio buffer size to 1152 when Logic allows up to 2048 for my MOTU interfaces?

Post by **Alex** » Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:36 pm

Hi indreamstudio,

Live limits the audio buffer size to maximal 1152 because the Motu 828 driver says it's the max possible value. Other apps like Reason doing excatly the same. I don't know why Logic allows up to 2048.

regards,
Alex

Live 2.0 and OS X

Live 2.0 and OS X

merry crashmas !

Cool feature Alex, and I don't think it would be too hard

dropouts in Live 2.01 under OS X 10.2.3 with MOTU