Squeezing the last performance out of Macbook Pro 2012

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stardotstar
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2016 4:52 am

Squeezing the last performance out of Macbook Pro 2012

Post by stardotstar » Tue Mar 09, 2021 9:27 pm

Hi guys, yet another hardware performance mac query here.

I have been using my MBP 2012 without any trouble till I upgraded to Ableton 11 Standard (via 10 Standard) from Ableton 9 Intro.

When I have Neural DSP plugins running I'm topping out the processor and getting artifacts. I used to freeze tracks when this happened but was able to get a couple of audio tracks to work with plugins running. Now it seems I'm out of headroom - CPU monitor shows 107+ and it's unworkable.

With just one track and a Neural DSP Plugin running in normal/mono the sound is great and latency is < 20ms

I have played with all the preferences - the buffers and sound quality is also on standard (plugins on mono and normal not high oversampling)

The machine is 2.7GHz Quad core i7 with 16G ram and ssd
The audio interface is Komplete Audio 6 Mk1

I also have a iMac (late 20125) 3.2GHz Quad Intel Core i5 with 8G ram and I doubt that this is a viable alternative (but I suppose I can lug it around the house and see if it works better if anyone thinks that's worth trying).

Would a better Audio Interface help? It might be cheaper to replace the Komplete Audio 6 than a new laptop, but I suspect I'm barking up the wrong tree here - the processing load is on the Mac after the signal is delivered from the audio interface right?

Maybe this is another case of someone needing to switch over to PC as I already looked at all the new MBPs and found them wanting, hence why I stuck out my old MBP (which is also stuck on Catalina now as it is a late 2012 model)

Interested in your thoughts, expertise and thank you for reading - I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to balancing all these computing requirements.

Piplodocus
Posts: 825
Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2007 9:48 pm
Location: Southampton, UK

Re: Squeezing the last performance out of Macbook Pro 2012

Post by Piplodocus » Fri Mar 12, 2021 2:26 am

Can't really add much useful - I'm milking the last out my 2010 MBP. I'm waiting for the new Apple Silicon MacBook Pro's later this year, and a native version of Live, and it should be a beasting combo. Should give me 10x the performance by my reckoning!?!! Currently my iPad Pro has 4x the multicore processing power of my current MacBook(!), but there just aren't decent DAWs available.

I don't want to produce on just an iPad anyway, and stuff like Cubasis 3, even though a pretty good looking DAW overall for an iPad, doesn't support basic tempo maps and time sig changes: a show-stopper for me (and I want Live anyway).

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