First off Reaper is one of the leanest DAWs in terms of CPU, and Live is one the the most pig like. That you're getting half what you got in Reaper is no surprise to me, in about 08 I was getting 60% in Live of what I could in Logic. Digital Performer now gets about twice as many tracks as Live routinely.keyman_sam wrote:Live has been struggling to play a moderate sized project (60 tracks) in my i7 2600K/20GB ram DAW with RME Babyface, which used to run 120+ tracks in Reaper without breaking a sweat at 256 samples. It is notable that this is my first serious project in Live after moving away from Reaper. This project literally has 3 VSTis - 1 omnisphere, 1 Kontakt, 1 EW Play. The rest are audio effects on audio tracks and sends, mostly Live's effects.
Also I've moved the project to a fresh 64-GB SSD to remove disk streaming concerns.
With all the stuttering I tried turning off Multicore support and lo-and-behold it actually got rid of a lot of the audio glitches. THe CPU now runs at 65-70% as opposed to 45% but the performance seems noticeably improved.
What should I gather from this? Is Ableton poorly optimized for multi-core support? Any solution I can try? I've played way bigger projects in Reaper without any glitches, so it can't be the computer. In fact as far as I can remember this is the first time I'm experiencing performance related problems in this computer. HELP!!
Live and most DAWs run CPUs on a per track basis, i.e. only a single core is used per track. People have mentioned this, but it's worth mentioning again. Even distribution of FX across tracks does increase track count etc. For instance with my 8 core Xeon if I run a few heavy tracks it hits 80% quickly, but dozens make only a slight dent in that. <--That says multi core is there, but single track management is mediocre.
I wish I had figured this out a lot earlier! 