Something is eating my CPU and it's impossible to work

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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Antoine84
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jan 31, 2018 10:24 am

Something is eating my CPU and it's impossible to work

Post by Antoine84 » Wed Jan 31, 2018 10:56 am

I'm not sure what it is, but my ableton becomes awful slow when the project get's bigger. Saving takes a lot of time, i can manage with that, but when the
stuttering begins it's almost impossible to work.
I've tried to change the buffer size and tried to freeze the tracks and what not, but i haven't found the issue yet.
When i clean my session and bounce everything to audio it works just fine, but i can not understand that how can it be so hard
to work with bigger projects on Ableton? I don't always want to bounce everything to audio, it would be nice to have the option to leave the Software Synths editable.

I just bought a new macbook a year ago so that should not be the problem.
Do you know any tricks on finding the problem and the CPU eater :D?
I use pretty common plug-ins, like Waves (rvox, cla76, cla vocals, soundshifter), Antares autotune, melodyne, XLN Retrocolor, Volumeshaper, Valhalla etc.
Synths like Kontakt, Serum, Massive, Keyscape. I sample a lot too and create new instruments with simpler.

One thing that i've done differently past months is that I made a template project, but it's pretty basic: 8-10 sends, plug-ins like Valhalla Vintage Verb, 3 soundshifters, echoboy, fabfilter timeless, PSP n20. Nothing special.

I'm using:

Ableton Live 9.7.5

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
2,9 GHz Intel Core i7
Os X 10.12.13

2pauluzz2
Posts: 146
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 6:34 pm

Re: Something is eating my CPU and it's impossible to work

Post by 2pauluzz2 » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:42 pm

With that kind of computer I would be surprised as well. Then again, you do use some heavy duty 3rd party plugins.

Does it happen when using an audio card, or without it as well?

I'm not a software specialist (there are quite a few on this forum who know these kinds of things) but my approach would be to trouble-shoot the set by deleting plugins one by one and seeing what that does to the CPU. There might be one or a few taking up unreasonable amounts of CPU. Perhaps start with Serum as I've heard it can be quite a CPU hog.

If you find a clear culprit, you could decide to abandon it or contact the developer to see what they can do.

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