Investigating Ableton’s Sluggish UI: Tests, Findings, and Fixes

[scg]

The obvious way around it is to stop Live, do your work, then play again. It's how all of us had to work 20 years ago in any DAW that wasn't Live regardless of where the CPU was, it would cause crashes or hangs for far more than 3 seconds etc.

Others can comment to confirm or deny this, but I think people are encountering this behavior even when playback is stopped, not just during playback. (That's been my experience, as far as I can remember anyway.)

[Machinesworking]

The obvious way around it is to stop Live, do your work, then play again. It's how all of us had to work 20 years ago in any DAW that wasn't Live regardless of where the CPU was, it would cause crashes or hangs for far more than 3 seconds etc.

Others can comment to confirm or deny this, but I think people are encountering this behavior even when playback is stopped, not just during playback. (That's been my experience, as far as I can remember anyway.)

The issue is this isn't a universal problem. to be honest I rarely get slowdowns at all in larger sets even, and absolutely never with smaller sets. Not at all denying that this happens for people, just explaining that some of the slow down behavior is normal.

I'm sitting here visiting relatives with Push 3 and a M1 Macbook Air, pushing it to right before failure with Diva and some Wavetables instances does not result in any slow down of the UI at all. I wonder if there's a third party plugin causing this? because I can't really replicate the issue.

[scg]

The issue is this isn't a universal problem.

I wasn't making an argument one way or another. I was just pointing out that it may not only happen during playback. (Also, even if it only happens for some people and not others, that doesn't mean it's not an issue.)

In any case, I just saw that the OP updated their post a while back. According to the OP at least, Ableton is aware of the issue and is looking into it. If Ableton can reproduce it, maybe they can analyze or profile or whatever and find out what causes it to happen (or not happen, as the case may be).

[benmuetsch]

Interesting finds and very well written!

I just tried that on my 2019 Mac Pro with the 12-core Xeon W-3235 CPU and 48GB RAM (running macOS Sonoma 14.8.1 and latest Live 12).

Running 44.1kHz and 256 samples buffer (my ususal setup), I can run 10 groups from bar 33 (other sections seem to be less intense), the 11th group causes dropouts. With 10 groups inserting a new blank audio track needs slightly under 4 seconds and everything feels a bit sluggish.

I would really like to know how my "old" Intel Mac Pro holds up against the M1 (Pro/Max/Ultra) machines, as the M4 Max is 2.6 times faster (which correlates extremely well with Geekbench scores).

[Machinesworking]

The issue is this isn't a universal problem.

I wasn't making an argument one way or another. I was just pointing out that it may not only happen during playback. (Also, even if it only happens for some people and not others, that doesn't mean it's not an issue.)

In any case, I just saw that the OP updated their post a while back. According to the OP at least, Ableton is aware of the issue and is looking into it. If Ableton can reproduce it, maybe they can analyze or profile or whatever and find out what causes it to happen (or not happen, as the case may be).

Reading through his post again, I'm even more confident that this is one of those things that may be improved, but not mitigated. This has been a discussion forever. I'm on the first gen Macbook Air here so to get 50+ tracks or the 200+ he talks about is a matter for another day as my CPU test here is Diva and I'm not getting near that.

The issue is really about polling, at least that's the way it was described years ago, Live polls everything all the time, unlike Logic, and the rest of the dinosaur DAWs. It's why a secondary buffer like they use to get higher track counts isn't a thing Ableton have done in the 22 years I've been following this forum and listening to people request higher track counts, or at least smoother operations at higher track counts. It's also why they don't bother with efficiency core type CPUs for any heavy lifting.

This is a personal opinion and this wouldn't be the first time if someone didn't particularly like the conclusion, Live isn't that great at 200+ track arrangements, or dozens of racks with complex routings in the same project etc. At some point the performance oriented engine of Live gets in the way of folks who want to use it for massive projects with hundreds of tracks.

[Chris Oswald]

I’m experiencing exactly this issue mentioned, with delays of up to 1 - 3 seconds when:

Adding/removing/grouping/moving tracks
Adding/removing/grouping/moving devices or plugins, even if they are lightweight
Changing routing or sidechain inputs

Really adds up over time, especially in large sessions where you need to work quickly and your session template already includes numerous vocal chains, drum racks and more

MacBook M1 Max 64GB
Ableton 12.2.5

If the delays are three seconds with the CPU meter in Live and in Mac OS (Lives is not always correct, so checking it in Activity monitor will let you know if system resources are taken up by other things), not above 80% then it's an issue, if it's above 80% CPU in Live, it's normal behavior. Live delays the instantiation of plugins and the messing with tracks in favor of audio not glitching. The obvious way around it is to stop Live, do your work, then play again. It's how all of us had to work 20 years ago in any DAW that wasn't Live regardless of where the CPU was, it would cause crashes or hangs for far more than 3 seconds etc.

The issues starts with the CPU way below 80% as mentioned in the post above. Also I'm not adding/moving tracks in this lagging state with an active playback. My post was just to confirm the problem, so hopefully we’ll see some possible workaround from the devs in the future, as you’ve already discussed

[H20nly]

@OP (Yannis)

Excellently explained and laid out. I’ve had these types of issues with Live too. As such, I only use it as a drum sequencer and/or to test/register new plugins/VSTi or to play old sets now. I found it easier to use other software that doesn’t suffer with these symptoms than to have a playhead that lags behind the audio while the CPU meter weeps.

I certainly hope that changes. I’m posting to *bookmark* this thread. I look forward to a resolution.

Thank you for your testing, efforts, and attitude

[Swedra]

I do not know if this is very relevant, but since Im also experiencing the sluggishness of Ableton I thought to chime in:

The UI sluggishness Ive come to just really accept, but something with the software or my system is not using or managing the CPU properly when Im running Ableton Live. Usually I use the "Balanced" power scheme, and while my hardware and work enviroment is not exactly studio professional (it is my home and gaming pc after all), I always felt like the CPU was underperforming and I always ran close to hitting dropouts when doing production when I really shouldnt, but I realized just yesterday that when I choose the "High Performance" power scheme, the baseline CPU usage does not change (or it does, but not THAT much) but from some limited testing the spikes that cause dropouts are all gone, no change to buffer settings (and buffer settings did not seem to impact things anyway), the only issue (and maybe this is by design?), the "High Performance" plan isnt exactly ideal to have set all the time, or as someone on a reddit thread said: "I don't want the CPU to run at 4.6~ friggin GHz when I'm just watching YouTube!", so for now I am using a batch file to change the power plan to a custom plan (using High Performance as a base since the schemes seem to change more behind the hood than what can be changed with the settings) when I start Ableton and go back to the Balanced scheme when I close the program, but it doesnt exactly feel optimal.

Did anyone else have a similar experience where either Ableton or the system is not "smart" enough to properly manage CPU allocation?

Specs, just for the record:

Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z790-P (Bios 0809)
RAM: 2x Kingston KF552C40-16 16gb
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K (3.6 Ghz base, around 4.8 max) (8 P-cores, 4 E-cores)
iGPU: Intel UHD Graphics 770
GPU: ASUS Dual RTX 3060 OC V2 LHR (12 gb)
Main Storage: Ableton and OS on a Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD Gen 4 1TB.
Other Storage: a Samsung Portable SSD T5 (1 tb) and an older Seagate 2tb HDD (that I only connect when needed for other things).
OS: MS Windows 11 Home (24H2)

TLDR: Anyone else encounter dropout and CPU allocation/usage issues with Ableton if the Microsoft Power Plan is set to "Balanced" rather than "High Performance", and is it by design that the "High Performance" plan seems to clock up the CPU to max regardless of usage?

I guess it is a bit of a "Peace of Mind" thing for me, but I find it kind of annoying and frustrating if I have to change the power plan just for this one specific program, and if it is like this for others or if something might be misconfigured on my end?