Grand piano and other EIC instruments hog CPU

TheAnimal · Post by **TheAnimal** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 10:30 pm

Grand piano and other instruments hog CPU for no apparent reason while Live itself displays low CPU usage.

Please see http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50213

kineticUk · Post by **kineticUk** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 10:50 pm

I also cannot use these instruments properly.
Please fix them.
Thanks

cherry-k · Post by **cherry-k** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 7:49 am

confirmed here, too.

best k.

kirle · Post by **kirle** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 6:26 pm

even loading the EIC grand piano takes about 12 minutes (yes it's true) on my system?!?! Anyone with same the same experience? Any ideas or solutions?

Kai

TheAnimal · Post by **TheAnimal** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 6:37 pm

In my case it doesn't take 12 minutes, but about 30 seconds when I load the grand piano into a track right after starting Live.

Cryptic UK · Post by **Cryptic UK** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 9:34 pm

Yes i have this problem, ive sent Ableton an email with my set.

tottigoool · Post by **tottigoool** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 11:48 pm

Same problem here. It's very strange...i've tried to open the sample-folder (waveforms > keys > piano) to take a look at the sampledetails; only looking into it costs 60% of my cpu-power (task-manager). The samples are in aiff, 48khz, 24bit format and they aren't convertible (tried to open the samples with CDXtract4) because of the protection. I have an optimal reconfigured pc system. It's a little bit old, but i can work very fast with it and never had problems...but after all..9min. to open only the grandpiano instrument is more than crazy...it's painful and it's not furthering the creativity during a session..strange, if you think that this is exactly what ableton live stands for...I'll hope that it will be fixed as soon as possible.

astar · Post by **astar** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:29 am

Same here, when I load grand piano the Live process's RAM usage goes up until about 300MB and CPU usage gets up to over 80% even though the Live GUI CPU meter doesn't reflect this. Over the next several minutes the CPU meter goes up and down between about 50% - 80% and mem usage jumps around between 100MB - 200MB.... Finally after about 10-15 minutes CPU usage finally goes down to almost nothing and mem usage stabilizes at about 140MB.

I wonder what is it doing in the background? Is it just taking a really long time to load the patch ??? I'm still able to play the piano while the CPU usage is high, but manipulating the live GUI is sluggish and loading more instruments is extremely slow!

Hope this is fixed for 6.0.2!

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:55 am

from my attempt to load the grand piano in RAM,

it appears that the grand piano patch amounts to over 5 gigs of samples!!

given that, it does not surprise me that many computers are having trouble with it (mine included!)

Winterpark · Post by **Winterpark** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:24 am

i'd imagine the long load would have something to do with the amount of space left of your hard disk, and how fragmented your hard drive is....

just a thought....

TheAnimal · Post by **TheAnimal** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:45 am

longjohns wrote:from my attempt to load the grand piano in RAM,

it appears that the grand piano patch amounts to over 5 gigs of samples!!

given that, it does not surprise me that many computers are having trouble with it (mine included!)

That would result in a high RAM usage and/or a lot of harddisk i/O activity but it does not explain high CPU usage.

tottigoool · Post by **tottigoool** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 2:29 pm

i'd imagine the long load would have something to do with the amount of space left of your hard disk, and how fragmented your hard drive is....

Nope....i've defragmented al my partitions with O&O and it's still the same...9min. for grandpiano.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:02 pm

TheAnimal wrote:
That would result in a high RAM usage and/or a lot of harddisk i/O activity but it does not explain high CPU usage.

?? the patch has two simplers, each with 32 note polyphony (elbeit the release note one is set to 'retrigger') and pulling from 5G+ of samples.

I don't know, it just doesn't surprise me that this is difficult for a computer to do!

fwiw, my comp takes about 30 seconds to load the patch. after that, the main problem i see is indeed the disk overload indicator, but accompanied by some cpu spikes at the dropouts... (by "spikes" - i mean up to about 30%)

but of course, i have no problem whatsoever if someone would be so kind as to fix it up!!

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:16 pm

i just played with turning off the simpler which plays the release samples. i don't much like the sound of the hammers falling back anyway. can't hurt, anyway

TheAnimal · Post by **TheAnimal** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:58 pm

I'm getting a lot of disk I/O in the beginning, which I think is absolutely normal and does not bother me at all. That also shouldn't hog the CPU, because of DMA.

My question is: What are my CPUs doing when they should be idle??? They are between 100 and 140% all the time without Live doing anything.

Must be a bug.