Frustration with Performance/Features

[somewhatsam]

So, after a long break I started picking up music production as a hobby again and decided to give ableton a try.

I immediately got hooked with the instrument rack feature in particular and have been building a lot of them to make it feel more like playing a bunch of synthesizers/instruments instead of fiddling with the mouse and keyboard....

But the further I progressed, the more I started struggling with some issues that made me doubt if either my idea of "Multi-instrument-rack-templates" OR ableton in general where the right path moving forward for me...

1. Peformance in general

I´m mostly making music on my laptop these days and while its not a top of the line one, its decently powered (HP spectre 360, 16 gb ram, I711390 3.4ghx, rtx 3050).
Maybe Ram is a bit on the low side, but I´m constantly getting CPU spikes in random places.
The whole idea of my setup is to be able to jam live, so don´t even start suggesting to freeze tracks or any such nonsense.
If I would wanna do that, I wouldn´t build sophisticated instrument racks that allow me to focus on NOT making decisions that would lead to freezing tracks early on...I don´t mind doing that down the line, but especially when jamming, I just wanna be able to do that without constantly worrying about performance.

I´ve also tried all the other usual suspects like power plan and increasing buffersize and sometimes they help and sometimes they don´t.
I remember using 128 or 256 samples with reason 15 years ago working pretty smoothly and now even at 1024 samples, I get crackles due to CPU spikes nonstop...
I´ve fixed the initial mistake about having samples on a network mapped drive that was waaaay to slow, I´ve also fixed the issue of using googledrive WITHOUT making the whole folder available offline, I don´t have any external virus scanner running and I still, after years, can´t figure out how to completely disable windows antimalware to do its thing in the background and I still suspect that to fuck things up, but can´t proove it...

I´m trying to minimize the use of individual delays and reverbs and mostly have channel strip effects like compressor, EQ and limiter on the instrument rack tracks, but I´ve also played around a lot with just disabling all effects and still had huge performance spikes.
I´ve set up chains to use multiple VST synths or drum racks per instrument rack and mapped them so they only get enabled when being activated via the chain selector macro, instead of being active all the time, all stuff thats been suggested for performance optimization and it doesn´t seem to make a lot of difference...
I´ve also tried several different asio drivers, including Asio4all and FL Asio and also tried with or without using an external USB audio device (Behringer) with its specific driver.

I´m getting tired of troubleshooting, when all I wanna do is jam for fun, but its ruined by bad performance...

I know that the right way to go would be to start from scratch, uninstall all plugins, uninstall all unneeded asio drivers and all that, but I´m still hoping to get some critical answers about the performance of ableton in general (which I´m now hearing is pretty abysmal, compared to lets say reaper) or peforming on a laptop in general.

Or at least some specific stuff like "can´t use more than 5 audio effects and 3 vst instruments realistically/needs 64GB ram to run smoothly" or anything like that.

2. Performance with loading /saving /quitting
The loading, saving AND quitting times are pretty abysmal on my system and I can´t figure out why.
Ok, again, I initially made the mistake of trying to have samples and plugins on an external drive and that slowed down things immensely.
But even now, after changing that, I´m sitting here, fiddling my thumbs for 10-20 minutes waiting for a song to load, that has one clip per track on 8 tracks with not a single audio recording, just these instrument racks and its really off putting and makes me never wanna touch a song I´ve started again...
But then it also takes 10 Minutes to save AND 10 Minutes to then CLOSE that song and now I really don´t wanna work on another one...

Whats the deal with that?
That can´t be normal, can it?
I realize that sometimes it seems to be rescanning the plugins folder forever and sometimes it doesn´t find some plugins and maybe its then stalling in that phase endlessly, but how would you fix that and what else could be causing these huge loading/quitting/saving times?

3. Workflow in general

There are currently two major showstoppers for me:
A) I thought the point of being able to save instrument racks was to be able to REFERENCE them in any other project. But apparently, they aren´t referencing the saved version, but always use the version used in the current project.
Which to some extent makes sense, as you wanna be able to open up a 3 year old project and everything would still sound the same way you left it.
Especially when you´re still figuring shit out and changing these instrument racks all the time.
But it also makes me not wanna open old projects at all, because I´d have to start hotswapping all the outdated instrument racks...
B) I´m TRYING to not skip around too much and I mostly use my laptop these days, but my recording equipment is all attached to my desktop workstation and I´ve tried to set up MOST of what I need using google drive, but you just can´t install all vsts there.
And then I´m here opening a song with some external plugin like "deelay" and while I´ve installed it on both systems, it shows up on the laptop and is shown as "missing" inthe other system...and that would be fine, if I could just point it to where its installed, but it seems like I only get the missing vst in the rack or track where its used on and even when I hotswap it out...its now completely clueless of the setting that it had been using in the original project.
And even better...I somehow manage to remember these settings and reproduce them, save the song, go back opening it on my laptop next time and now its missing THERE...
Is there a smarter way to handle these missing plugins?
Same goes for preset patches etc by the way...
Again, trying to be smart about it and save as much as possible on google drive.

And I also know that you can supposedly save everything within that song folder structure, including samples and presets used.
But for one that doesn´t seem to work properly with all the vst plugins and their patches and also I know have gigabytes of copies of the same drum samples somekick.wav, somekick-1.wav, somekick-2.wav and so on, because it keeps copying the same samples over and over and over because its too dumb to realize that they are already IN that folder...

Whats that all about?

[dsu]

So, after a long break I started picking up music production as a hobby again and decided to give ableton a try.


1. Performance in general

Or at least some specific stuff like "can´t use more than 5 audio effects and 3 vst instruments realistically/needs 64GB ram to run smoothly" or anything like that.

Unfortunately I don't think you can get an accurate recommendation on how much stuff; effects VSTs you can run at one time.

In my experience, Live's Operator instrument use less CPU than the Wavetable synth as an example. There is so much variability in resource requirements, any rule of thumb is pointless.

You seem to be doing all the right things. I wonder if part of the problem is with Windows itself, periodically deciding to go do something that is taking away resources you need in real time. Microsoft sysinternals has a number of tools that let you dig a little deeper than Task Manager but as you wrote you want to jam not troubleshoot. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

On thing that I am not clear about is how Live disables vsts instruments and effects. My understanding is one of Live's characteristics is it does a lot of processing that is muted so that when activated the audio is already there and in time with everything else. I have not idea under what circumstances this does or does not take place.

Hope someone can provide more details on this topic.

[Angstrom]

Thats a big thread but I'm not seeing what audio interface you are using, or what ASIO driver?
The performance issues detailed would be highly unusual for a standard windows music making laptop with a budget audio device and an ASIO driver.
For me on windows Live 12 opens and closes in about 4 seconds, and my driver is set on 128 on my windows machine (shorter on my macbook, but thats normal) . My usual audio device is a MOTU UltraliteMK5, but even much cheaper audio devices will give great performance. I have a "backup backup doesnt matter if it gets stolen" audio device which is a Behringer 404HD, and that actually gives really good latency and resource usage considering the price.

So, audio device, asio driver. Most likely the issue

[x3000]

start latencymon and check whether your laptop could still make it. here you can also find out where the causes lie.

https://resplendence.com/latencymon

[somewhatsam]

Thanks for all the replies, I haven´t gotten the time to dig much deeper and I´ll definitely check out these links.

Me not WANTING to spend more time troubleshooting doesn´t mean I´m not still gonna...way too much time invested already and I really DO love my instrument racks a LOT.

A few more things to add:
I have a cheap behringer usb audio device, but its usually attached to my workstation.
On my laptop I´ve mostly been using the FL asio driver, as the asio4all driver doesn´t allow parallel playback, so I can´t even look at some youtube tutorial with it.

I HAVE tried to somehow benchmark performance between using the FL asio driver with not external audio device and the behringer with its custom asio driver.
And while the behringer asio driver lets me go lower than the I think 256 or 512 samples limit of the FL asio driver, performance doesn´t seem much better.

One weird thing I found though:
On that one project I had a very distinct stutter around the same timecode everytime and it also seemed to be "looping", which ultimately led me to the drum track, that was simply playing one of the stock drum midi clips that ship with ableton.

I could then furthermore "fix" that problem, by creating a new empty midi clip in session view and copy pasting the original clips content into that.
Doing that made the stutter magically disappear.

This might have been THE ongoing issue, no idea why its only happend on the laptop though and if there are other things still going on.

About the loading/saving/quitting times:
Those issues are of course NOT with an empty ableton set.
But as soon as I load multiple racks or my template project (which has all the racks in it), loading and saving times become a real issue.

Again, I´ve already "optimized" some stuff, simply by using less sample intense drum racks and of course all sample based instrument racks take quite a bit more time loading (another reason why I prefer working purely with synths).
But that also makes me think that may main hardware bottleneck on my laptop migt be RAM related, as I only have 16 gigs and my workstation has 64...

I´m also sure people work more effectively than me with less though...

[resonantorder]

Borrow a decent interface to check, and a huge amount of your problems will go away.

Seriously.

[somewhatsam]

Well, not sure what you consider "decent", but as I´ve stated above, I DID test the laptop with the audio interface I use on my workstation and performance wasn´t notably better with it.
I could still try to do a clean install of the audio driver, or rather just uninstall the asio4all and the FL Asio driver to see if that makes a difference, but especially the loading/saving performance certainly doesn´t have to do anything with the audio interface.

And right now thats a bigger problem for me right now, as it eats up way too much time, if I just have an hour or two in the evening to play around/jam.

Guess that doesn´t matter as much, if you´re doing longer sessions.

[somewhatsam]

I still need to do the latency mon test setup, but I´ve also talked to some friends and next steps for me is to rethink my instrument rack setup...

The whole idea with the dozens of chains with duplicate VST instruments, just so I can switch easily between preselected presets is kinda nuts.

Its one of these things where my disbeliev and frustration with some seemingly triviaoblem has led me down a rabbithole that ultimately led to a lot of overcomplification...

It makes zero sense to me that
A) That with most VST instrumenst I´ve tried there isn´t an option to map the preset browsing buttons to either a custom key or a midi cc signal.
B) That the only workaround in ableton seems to be the "one instance per preset on a separate chain" workaround.

I´ve made a reduced version of my setup where each instrument rack only has ONE instance of the VST instrument and that loads and saves WAY faster.

Performance wise there isn´t much of a difference, as I´ve mapped the instruments to the chain selector macro, so they only turn on when they are selected.
But ableton either still keeps them in memory and has to use the page file due to low system memory, when switching between chains, or it does some other stuff when saving/loading, that makes it take longer and longer the more chains an instrument rack uses.

Again, the reason for this setup was mostly to feel less bound to mouse and keyboard when playing around and to simplify my "sound pallete" and I might be better off just using a favourite system or not rely as much on presets in the first place in the future.

I´m glad I found the midi clip problem, hoping the latencymon test can maybe shed some light on WHY playing simple midi climps make my CPU stutter like that...

I´m also gonna try and further reduce the amount of audio effects I use.
I´ve been trying to be smart and set up each instrument rack with its own channel strip and insert FX selection, but that means I also have 8-10 times as many effects and maybe I really only need them, when I need them.
When I´m either arranging stuff after playing around and finding ideas and decide that I DO need a different effect than what I have as a standard on my send channels for that one track.
Or when I´m done arranging and starting to master.

And then I can just drag and drop in the audioFX racks I´ve created already, so the work wasn´t for nothing.

I´ve generally been maybe a bit too focused on "optimizing my workflow" instead of just creating stuff, but again, I often have only a little bit of time here and there and having to then deal with technical issues is also a pretty big motivation killer...

[somewhatsam]

Also I just stumblend upon this post, gonna see if that could solve some of my more random performance issues as well:

I've had similar problems. I tried the Realtime option, which did not work for me. What did work for me was opening a command prompt as an Administrator and typing this...

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live 11 Suite\Program\Ableton Live 11 Suite.exe"

As I understand it, it stops windows pushing background apps off to efficient cores from the performance cores. I've had 6 months of hell trying everything to get Live to work when it's not the foreground app. I was honesty going to ditch my new PC and get a Mac as it was driving me crazy. I stumbled on this from someone who had problems with render times in a video editor when the app wasn't in the foreground.

It's been absolutely rock solid since.

THIS TIPS SEEMS TO WORK ON MY SIDE AS WELL!!! I'll update my post if it will not work! But for now THANK YOU for posting this solution!!! Davide

[Yearofthegoat]

I've only really skimmed the thread but two things stand out:

1 - ASIO drivers: they can be multi-client (like my RME audio interface) or single-client. This is why, when you set an ASIO device as the default in Windows, you can only hear one source at a time - unless your ASIO driver is multi-client. It's also why FL Studio has an 'Auto Close' option for the audio output.

2 - LatencyMon: this will let you see what is causing those CPU spikes. This could be power management programs - particularly on a laptop which will be optimised to save battery power - or CPU management programs, like CPU throttling, or CPU core parking, or moving threads. The latter is a big deal on Intel CPUs with their Big/Little architecture. If the system decides to move your audio thread while it's playing, you may well hear it as a click or pop. There was a massive thread on this very subject over in the Cubase forums when 13 came out. The threads moving to Efficiency cores ruined audio and/or performance. There are programs like Process Lasso which can 'tie' your Ableton/DAW threads to specific cores to stop this. AMD CPUs don't have this architecture and don't have this issue - they can have the core parking one when power-saving is on, but it's easy to turn that off.

The best driver to use should be the one that came with the audio interface. ASIO4ALL can be handy but is an ASIO wrapper/aggregator and therefore can add latency.

[benmuetsch]

Try disabling your RTX GPU and use only the iGPU, Nvidia drivers may introduce issues.

[somewhatsam]

2 - LatencyMon: this will let you see what is causing those CPU spikes. This could be power management programs - particularly on a laptop which will be optimised to save battery power - or CPU management programs, like CPU throttling, or CPU core parking, or moving threads. The latter is a big deal on Intel CPUs with their Big/Little architecture. If the system decides to move your audio thread while it's playing, you may well hear it as a click or pop. There was a massive thread on this very subject over in the Cubase forums when 13 came out. The threads moving to Efficiency cores ruined audio and/or performance. There are programs like Process Lasso which can 'tie' your Ableton/DAW threads to specific cores to stop this. AMD CPUs don't have this architecture and don't have this issue - they can have the core parking one when power-saving is on, but it's easy to turn that off.

The best driver to use should be the one that came with the audio interface. ASIO4ALL can be handy but is an ASIO wrapper/aggregator and therefore can add latency.

FL Asio works just fine, I know you just skimmed, but I´ve mentioned that I DID some test with the audio interface driver (behringer) and it didn´t change performance much, so I didn´t do further testing.
And also the interface isn´t usually connected to my laptop anyways, so I HAVE to rely on FL ASIO for now.
Question would be, if it makes any difference if I try a clean install and remove all traces of previously installed asio drivers...

I´ve also started reducing my "startup template" project a lot and in the future I´ll probably stop pretending I´m opening the door to my fully equipped studio with a dozen hardwaresynths and audio racks when I open that template and instead go back to creating my instrument racks as presets and then just load them in as I go.

Because rn my biggest workflow killer is more the loading and saving times than the performance.
Who wants to work for half an hour on a previous jam, when loading alone takes 10 minutes and who wants to keep working if you have time to drink 2 coffees while just trying to save your progress every half hour....not me...

I also still haven´t gotten around latency mon, but yeah, that "midi clip" crackling is really putting me off from any testing more, because its so easy to reproduce on my laptop, but I have ZERO idea what the problem ist there, especially since I can "Fix" it by simply copying the clip data in a fresh, empty clip...
I mean, its a lot better than "random spikes" when you have no idea whats causing them, but thats what stuff like latency mon is built for.
In this case, when loading scenes or playing certain midi Clips ALWAYS create these issues, I can´t imagine that the latency mon would tell me anything new.
Nevertheless, I´ll get back to this thread next time I have time AND motivation to troubleshoot further...