Just got a Xeon Quad 2.6. I'm in the process of making the migration from my older Mac to the new one. The first application I transfered was Ableton Live 5.0. My older G4 digital audio (533mhz) now has a single 1.5ghz processor (1.2gig RAM) I installed myself last year. Although Abelton chewed up CPU processing power on the G4, I managed to work around it through careful planning and freezing tracks. Problem: On the Quad I opened up Live, selected a drum kit for a one measure sequence. (midi set-up not yet migrated) I next clicked a few noted in the midi matrix window using my mouse and hit play. The CPU load shot up to between 68 and 70% usage from one instrument on one track, triggering 3 or 4 drum sounds in a one measure loop. Even my single processor G4 performed better than this.
Question: Live 5 is supposedly compatible with multiprocessors, including Intel Xeon, right? I haven't contacted Apple yet but does anyone know if Rosseta in the translation process is the culprit? Does Live 6 take care of this issue or does anyone think it's just my computer? Steinberg for instance will not supply updates for Cubase SX, SL, SE, etc. Instead, they introduced Cubase 4 and Cubase 4 Studio wich they claim will work with Xeon, etc.
I'm not sure I'm confident in upgrading to Abelton 6 if it will make no difference to my current situation.