What kind of performance should I expect from Live 6 for PC?

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 4:07 am

I recently downloaded the demo for Live 6 having been interested and followed Live's progress for a while. I was seriously considering purchasing it but I wanted to trial it first. The demo eventually worked after crashing my computer the first 2 times it tried installing. I have heard many good things about Live being an efficient tool like Propellerhead's Reason (which I own v2.5) but am finding the demo to be very sluggish and nasty...

I am finding that it does not like my computer setup very well...maybe I'm missing something but it is dropping out and glitching with a very light demand on it. I own Cubase SX3 and Reason 2.5 and can run both of these successfully stand alone or using rewire but using Live 6 demo I could never run more than 3 audio clips in session view at a time before dropouts occurred. I reduced the latency to 1,024 then 2,048 samples to little effect, the CPU meter goes around 71-85 if you try running more than 3 audio clips.

In Cubase SX I can run more than 20 audio tracks with fx at 512 samples (12 ms latency) and in Reason I can run about 30 racks of NNXT, Subtractor etc at 256 samples (6ms latency) - I can also set CPU load to 90% on REason to give me a little more protection from glitches. Rewired, I can run several reason racks alongside 14-18 audio/midi tracks on Cubase with no sweat. Below is a copy of the e-mail I sent to ableton support, your comments/suggestions would be appreciated !

"My hardware is not the most current, but it is better than many others running Live. I am running a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop w/ 3.2 Ghz P4 desktop CPU, Win XP Home SP2, 1 GB 400 Mhz dual channel DDR, 60 GB 7200 HDD (52% empty) internal and 300 GB (219 GB free) external 7200 rpm w/16 MB buffer Maxtor One Touch Ultra III HDD, ATI Radeon 9700 graphics (128 MB) and an Echo Indigo IO pcmcia audio card with ASIO 2.0 driver updated it to the latest driver 6.14 with no significant improvement over the previous 6.11 driver. I run disk defragmenter and keep my pc running as well as I can.

I really like the look of Live 6 but it's performance on my laptop is just not good enough for me to consider splashing any money on it unless I can work out why this is happening? I tried rewiring Live 6 with Cubase SX3 and it was horrible, if anything more than1 clip was selected in Live, it glitched and dropped out like crazy. I tried Reason again in rewire mode and no problems piping several audio channels via rewire into SX3. Can you advise me on any bugs or fixes or hardware tweaks that might get Live running better, I would need to be able to run at least 7 or 8 clips simultaneously, or 5 or 6 with 2-3 midi tracks to make it worth my while purchasing. I really hope you can help because all the tasty features make it a great program, but if I can barely run it or rewire it then I can't buy it !!"

p.s. - Processor scheduling set to background services as advised, all other programs (a/v, firewall, web browsers, applications) and non essential services turned off in task manager, when Live is doing nothing it is using 212,000 kb as opposed to 68,000 - 102,000 kb that cubase sx is using, according to task manager. Also in Live's preferences, the hyperthreading/multi processor support tab is greyed out even though I have H/T enabled and Cubase SX makes good use of it in sx3.1

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 4:55 am

that really seems strange to me. your computer should be running live much better than that.

try deleting "preferences.cfg" from the ableton folder

live does not use hyperthreading. i find a slight boost from having it disabled in BIOS, but I believe Live disables it anyway so it shouldn't matter anyway

pribeh_tom · Post by **pribeh_tom** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 4:40 pm

Live 6 is the buggiest version of live since version 2 - I never tried version one.
Wait for an update - it should be a big one.

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:35 am

Problem solved - my AC adapter had gone defective and wasn't supplying full power hence less CPU power, now I can run 8 audio tracks and stay within 40-50% CPU range which is sufficient.