Why does ableton run better on a Macbook with worse specs?

[claudedefaren]

I usually use an hp envy dv7t 7200nr, but recently decided to test how many plugins ableton could handle on my mbp i have for work (unrelated). It has a slower processor than my hp laptop, same amount of ram. Using a test of a single audio clip and throwing on FF Pro-L, pushing the gain to 1.5db and duplicating the plug-in, ableton on my hp laptop could handle 28 of the duplicates before hitting 100% on the cpu meter. The macbook, again with less processing speed, could take 40 of the duplicates.

What is the reason for this? The plug-in settings and the audio clip were the same. It's making me think i should bite the bullet and switch to a Macbook..

Please don't turn this into a petty fanboy war

[commuter]

hello,

"Energy Options

Modern computer systems, and especially mobile devices, are engineered for the purpose of saving as much energy as possible. However, this is often at the cost of the computer’s overall performance, making it more likely to experience audio dropouts. The following should be tried to eradicate energy-saving related performance problems.

Go to Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options.Set the Power Scheme to High Performance (if this setting is not available, click on Show additional plans first). Then click on Change plan settings. On the next page set both Turn off the display and Put the computer to sleep to Never.
"

[pencilrocket]

because ableton coded shitty? idk. other DAW works better on Win.

[Airyck]

Were you using an audio interface with drivers or were you just using built in laptop audio? Apple Core audio (Audio for all Macs) have low latency audio drivers built into the system where windows does not. So if you were trying to push things a low latency the Mac would handle it better than the PC laptop (if you are using 3rd party interface/drivers this shouldn't matter as much).


Also I think on a windows machine you want to set the Processor priority to "background services" rather than "programs". This gives priority to things like audio interface drivers, seems counter intuitive but I'm pretty sure that's how it supposed to be setup for audio. Sorry it's been a while since I've setup a Windows machine for music.

Once I got a Mac for music I just sort of phased out all my Windows machines and now I have nothing but Macs. Love it or hate it but Apple/OS X are really the only ones who seem to give a shit about low latency audio and professional audio in general (built into the OS).

Between core audio low latency, aggregate devices, and being able to route interfaces Audio and MIDI to each other in a modular sort of fashion right in the OS just make me not want to deal with setting up and hacking around to get things to work well on a windows machine when I don't have to do anything to make it work on OS X. Windows is fine and works great and you can get equivalent power for cheaper but I just don't want to deal with it anymore.

[claudedefaren]

On Windows I was running Ableton with my Scarlett 2i2 connected, using that as the audio device. I'll give the background services thing a shot, definitely counter intuitive The power saving options weren't an issue as I already have those maximized for performance.

[ImNotDedYet]

Could be a number of reasons other than Mac vs. PC. How many services were running in the background on both? How much RAM was being taken by those services? How big is the swap drive on each? Is the hard drive more maxed out on one vs. the other? What's the speed of the RAM on both as well as hard drive speeds?

Is the Mac CPU just lower clocked? Are there more actual cores on the Mac than the PC?

And I've not really heard good things about the CPU meter in Ableton being an actual representation of CPU usage. Not sure if it's the same with Mac.

[hacktheplanet]

I fix OSX and Windows every day at work. Generally speaking, I see more performance issues with the Windows machines. The OSX issues I see are usually because we are mostly a Microsoft shop and OSX isn't suited towards enterprise as well as Windows is.

I suspect you may be running a bunch of extra crap HP or Microsoft likes to install, which will severely affect performance. Remove any software you don't use, update/run Defender, update Windows, and update, drivers, and possibly see if HP has released any firmware updates for your machine.

The only way to really tell would be to do a fresh install of each system and then compare them. I generally rebuild my Windows machine every 9 months or so, and my OSX machine every 12-18 months.