CPU out of control on MacBook Pro Any suggestions?

[Bender_Mon]

MacBook Pro w/ following specs:

2.53 GHz Intel dUo
4 GBN 1067 MHz DDR3
OS X 5.8

is going out of control!!! on CPU.... 50-70% while still... no tracks playing.
I'm going out of the headphone jack now... tried with Kore as audio card same thing.
Session is all audio, 16/44

Mixing down a four piece band... drums, bass, guitar, vocals... NOTHING SPECIAL here

lots of sub-groups... is this it? in total probably 20 tracks subgrouped into 4 or 5 using Groups function

Only using ableton plug-ins... NO MIDI

played around will all my buffer/latency/multi-core/ sound settings... nothing changes.

getting ready to try and run session from an external harddrive... we'll see... thanks to mac it's only a USB 2 HD.... wish they'd upgrade me for free to a new laptop with the firewire they've brought back! Who knows? Anythings possible right?

Anyone have any suggestions about freeing up CPU in general with a Mac?... seems like somethings messed up here on Live's part... was hoping most of the bugs were worked out with 8.1.1 guess not.

Thanks,

Ben

[diogo_semedo]

My mbp is pretty similar to yours and I'm getting the same s+++tty problem. I have a project with 15 tracks already with MIDI and audioclips and it is raping my CPU. Don't know what's happening but I doubt things could, in a normal situation, change so much from 7 to 8.1.1 (bought 8.1.1 last friday and wanted to cut my head off...). I, in my innocent ignorance, suggest this is a "non-desireable feature".

Ok, the plug-ins got better, the algorhythm (correct spelling?) may be better but come on ableton... We deserve better - you've made the program we dreamed of. But you're killing us now

[mattridenour@gmail.com]

I started having the same problem a couple days ago as well, which would be on about Jan 27, 2010, the same day the two of you posted. Perhaps is a result of the last Mac OS X security update?

[diogo_semedo]

That's interesting. I'm currently talking to support to try to understand what's wrong. Send them an email! Please, anyone with this kind of problems, CONTACT SUPPORT! The more support gets knowledge of this, the sooner it will be fixed.

[mattridenour@gmail.com]

I'm in contact with support. I'm pretty happy they got back to me quickly but we're still hashing it out.

[diogo_semedo]

Nice! Support only answered at the second try but they did answer fast. Anyway, we have the same problem so we could help ourselves. Do you use Logic also? Or any of its plug ins? Are you having erratic mouse behaviour on heavy CPU use? and VST or AU synths?

[mattridenour@gmail.com]

I was able to fix this issue on my mac, it seems to be laptop specific.

The source of the problem seemed to be with the energy saver settings and the battery. The energy saver functionality couldn't determine whether the battery was present (even if running off just the battery) and switched to a lower performance energy saving mode yet still displayed the high performance settings in the menu bar. Removing the battery and reseating it while plugged into the external power outlet fixed the problem. I'm a Mac OS X system administrator and I've never seen that before. Weird stuff.

[Bender_Mon]

Sweet! Just reading these responses, but I'll definitely try the battery trick. Hopefully Live gets some more of the bugs worked out soon. I'm having crashes all over the map still on both my laptop and desktop.

[diogo_semedo]

That didn't work for me, but I have a project where the project by itself STOPPED was eating 24% of my CPU Anyone had any luck with support?

[zumba]

i am running macbook 2.2 4g of ram OS X 10.6.2
To me it seems like Live is running terribly slow.
I also have had problems with my motu soundcard crasing all of sudden.
Live 7 still works great (which means to me it is not the computer or OS) although i confused my librarys and cannot open any instruments in it as of now...
anyway hoping for a new version SOOOOOON
so i can stop wasting time in 8 and get to writing some music.

[diogo_semedo]

Are you having similar problems to those reported here?

[mattridenour@gmail.com]

Sorry to hear your fix isn't going to be as simple as reseating the battery.

These are the instructions Ableton support first instructed me to do when I contacted them:

- close Live
- delete the "Preferences.cfg", "Undo.cfg" and "Template.als" files from
~/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 8.1.1
- delete the content of this folder:
~/Library/Caches/Ableton/Cache/Web/
and the content of this folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Ableton/Live 8.1.1/Database
- run apple's repair permissions from the disk utilities
- restart Live

I would highly recommend contacting Ableton support if you haven't already and include a copy of your Ableton log file. (The log file is located here: ~/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 8.1.1/Log.txt)

Also, run Apple's /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app to see if there are any other processes eating up CPU cycles or working harder than normal. It's what I used to track down my problem.

[zumba]

funny ableton support had me delete some of these but not all of them... so giving it a try and we shall see what happens
thanks for taking the time to post these instructions.
s;]

[diogo_semedo]

I've found that Live 8 "only" eats 1 gb ram on my pc, fewer than I thought. But, the processor is still being kicked in his silicone butt, running 6 tracks with VST and AU, stuttering... Go try the log thingy.

[diogo_semedo]

That log-deleting-stuff is not working, I found strange that some of the files you told us weren't there...