Will Live ever be optimized for the Mac?

[mortalengines]

I would first like to say that I love playing around with Live, it's flexabilty in regards to sample manipulation & plug in use is just incredible but I am starting to run into some problems with Live's cpu usage on my G4 powerbook (1.5ghz, 1.25 gig of RAM). Even with 9 frozen tracks & 3 aux returns (one reverb & two delays) I can average around 30% to 50% usage during playback with the odd audio glitch coming up (I have increased both my plug in buffer & my audio buffer to 1024 samples) & am now running off of an Oxford 911 7200 RPM hard drive. The only things I haven't done are running tracks off of RAM or converted to mono any of my stereo tracks. I am not sure how much either of those will really help at this point but I will give them a go. I gues the question is....is this standard procedure for the Mac environment? I understand that even a modestly priced PC will run Ableton more efficiently (though I bought a mac because it ran many audio apps much more smoothly than my old PC tower). I guess I am just looking forward to an update that will hopefully run with a little less strain on my CPU than what I get with 5.0.3. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

[Angstrom]

Live will not now be optimised for Altivec or the older Apple CPUs , but ...

Live 6 will run better on a multi-processor G series, and

Live 5.2 and greater will run on a new Mac-Intel nearly as good as a PC



!

[Machinesworking]

I gues the question is....is this standard procedure for the Mac environment? I understand that even a modestly priced PC will run Ableton more efficiently (though I bought a mac because it ran many audio apps much more smoothly than my old PC tower).
I guess I am just looking forward to an update that will hopefully run with a little less strain on my CPU than what I get with 5.0.3. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

Live runs the same on PC's, it's just that Live uses only raw speed, no altivec etc. So a 2Ghz PC laptop will give you 25% more power....

There's a possibility that Live 6 is optimized in general, not just for dual CPU machines, and that would give even a powerbook of our speed, ( I have the same model), a slight boost.

[mortalengines]

What are your workaround solutions to the CPU load then. Are you just using Ableton for what it does best (loop manipulation) & using another app for final sequencing & editing. Or are you just running some tracks from RAM, etc?

[longjohns]

many people benefit from bouncing vsti's to audio (keep a midi track for later tweaking) and then deleting the vst's from the set.

[AdamJay]

also using AUMatrixReverb, instead of Live Reverb.
it sounds damn good on its own...

EQ4 instead of EQ3

disable unusend EQ4 bands.

mix at a higher buffer

disable unused inputs and outputs in AUDIO preferences. input config / output config