New MacBook Pro with Live 11 - You've got to be kidding!!

[Pitch Black]

You can look at Live funny and it hits 14%. I'm not kidding, Lives CPU meter has always been a bit quick to jump to at least 14% and has more headroom around 70% than you would think. I've said this a million times on this forum, the only reliable stress test for a computer running a DAW is one "to failure" using a trusted heavy CPU sucking plug in like Diva. basically play the same MIDI track looped using multiple instances of Diva, when audio is compromised back off. That's a rough estimate of your computers potential.

Hey Mach, got a test project you’d like to share with the forum? Might be fun to have a new yardstick for us to kick around….

[Machinesworking]

Hey Mach, got a test project you’d like to share with the forum? Might be fun to have a new yardstick for us to kick the tyres over…

I threw together a Diva test file for all the DAWs on my system (Live11 Suite, Digital Performer 11, Logic, Reaper and Bitwig), around the time I first got the M1, so yeah no problem, here's the Google Drive link!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12rWK1_ ... sp=sharing

[Pitch Black]

Top man yerself!!

[Krubbadoo]

Hello guys. Any results to share on this Diva test? How many tracks do you get? Thanks

[Angstrom]

I wonder if a native test might be better than using Diva

I test my machines with a big fat Wavetable preset through a convo reverb , a clip playing 8 note chords. I then duplicate that track until everything falls apart.

[Pasha]

I create a song and then duplicate it until it fails. I have VST and native Ableton FX and Instruments.
So far I have a 10 track song that can go as much as 80 tracks on Mac Mini M1.

[Machinesworking]

I wonder if a native test might be better than using Diva

I test my machines with a big fat Wavetable preset through a convo reverb , a clip playing 8 note chords. I then duplicate that track until everything falls apart.

Yeah, sure, but the test I did was to compare 5 different DAWs so it required a plug in you could use on all of them that had some CPU sipping tendencies. Your test makes more sense as a replacement for the current Live test, and yeah definitely any test should be right up to failure.

[Krubbadoo]

@Machinesworking any test results to share? Thanks

[Machinesworking]

@Machinesworking any test reulsts to share? Thanks

I can get 20 instances of Diva running in the test I shared, M1 MacBook Air, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD.
I would bet around 32+ on the M1 Pro and Max, considering they're getting 1.6x more CPU than the M1, and 60+ or so on the M1 Ultra.

[wildcon]

Hi, see my previous post.

I got 75 instances of Diva without it falling over on my M1 max 32gig

[Krubbadoo]

@Machinesworking, thanks and you were are totally right! I got 32 tracks (M1x MBP 16GB) working perfectly but @33 it started glitching.

@wildcon I suppose your 75 instances were not achieved with @Machinesworking test, right?

I know there is another test here: https://music-prod.com/ableton-live-mac ... mark-list/. I did 217 tracks without glitching with the suggested settings.

Thanks for your help guys.

[wildcon]

@wildcon I suppose your 75 instances were not achieved with @Machinesworking test, right?

That’s correct. I just loaded the plug-ins with a midi track. I’ll check out the test

[cids]

"For larger buffersizes and low load, macOS determines that it can use the M1's efficiency cores to do the audio calculation, and it only switches to performance cores when the load hits certain thresholds. With lower buffer sizes, macOS uses performance core more predictably. We're in contact with Apple about this issue, but it's unclear when / if we can improve this or if this requires a fix by Apple."

[Pitch Black]

My results of Machinesworking's Diva test:

16" MacBook Pro M1Max / 32GB RAM / 1TB
MacOS 12.3
Live 11.1.1
Logic Pro 10.7.3
Diva 1.4.5 demo
RME Fireface 800
Sample rate 48k in all tests
Audio Buffer 256 Samples as per Machinesworking's test specs:

Live: 32 Divas before crackling.
Logic Pro: 35 Divas before stopping with alert.


Some very interesting results with lower Audio Buffer settings though...

Live's performance stays the same at 128 samples, then decreases at 64 and 32 samples:
128 Samples:
32 Divas before crackling.
64 Samples:
24 Divas before crackling.
32 Samples:
9 Divas before crackling.

But here's the weird one - Logic's performance increases at 128 samples, and this increase remains present down to 64 and 32 samples:

128 and 64 and 32 Samples:
36 Divas before stopping with alert.

Apple must have some interesting combo of Apple-specific code, and/or chip architecture to achieve this.
I'd be interested to see if any other testers out there can reproduce these Logic results.

[murgatroid]

At least I'm not the only one experiencing crashy 11. I'm still on a 2012 mini High sierra. Live 11 crashes at the drop of a hat it seems. The other day it did while simply renaming a clip. And once it crashes, it won't launch again till I trash the prefs. Never had that happen before. 11's a dog...at least on my end.

Enjoy your new machine. Hoping to get one of them newfangled Mac Studio's in the future or maybe an M2 mini when that shows up.