Ableton live 4 with a Mac or PC?

[Sickboy]

Hello
Its an old and boring one, but going to ask it anyway
I want to know if live is working better on a pc laptop (feel free to say what kind your using), or on a ibook/powerbook

I heard from 2 people yesterday and today that it would be better on PC.

One of the two mailed me this about his iBook

"And i'm very disapointed with it, i'm using LIVE 4 and it run very badly on
it..
I'm leaving the mac platform for the second time : nice OS but really
underpowered
With the same song, the ibook use 66% of CPu, and my centrino laptop use
27%, so.......
Windows is really stable now, an it run Ableton LIVE perfectly....."


What do you use, and are you happy with it?

Sorry in advance for starting this kind of a topic... try to stay friends

ciao

[Hervé]

All the answers you reallly need : http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

[Sickboy]

All the answers you reallly need : http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

yup, found that one also
thanks

[drush]

yes it runs more efficiently on a pc. if that qualifies as better, there ya go

personally i still think it's better on a mac cuz i think the mac is better. i work around any headroom problems with little effort. and i really don't have those problems often at all

so there ya go, too..

[3phase]

PC is better for Live.
This is mainly because Live dont uses all the the resources a Mac can give and the Abletons seem to be more PC experts.
At least the MAc versions of Live allways had a more critical bug state as the PC versions.

[Henrik]

I'm wondering why soft- and hardware developers won't make statements about the pros and cons with Windows XP and and Apple OSX. I remeber reading an interview with a developer at Propellerheads (when OSX was newly released) and he said something like: "if we were developing products for OSX only it would be very easy to build new software, but since we have to release equivalent versions for Win XP it takes a lot more time and effort to reach forward".

Thats all I've heard - so what's keeping them so quiet?

[koranek]

I don't know if they are exactly being quiet. Look at the recent performance test results done here. Although there are some general trends, there are a lot of confusing results (like how did someone with a slower computer but same basic model do better than a slightly faster one). It's a confusing topic.

One thing good about most of the major players these days is that they are willing to give you a fairly fully functioning demo to try it on your particular machine so you can decide for yourself.

When you think about it, this industry started way back when on 100 Mhz machines with 256 K (not 256 M) of ram. This worked because basically you have to do most of your work in one 44.1 Khz cycle. As machines got faster and faster I really expected them to finally be fast enough for everyone. But add virtual effects and VSTi's and the squeeze starts all over.

I hate it when I can't do everything I want, but when I think about it, what I can do even with my modest machine is still pretty amazing.

[MarkH]

I think it's fair to say Live is not the most well-written Mac program because it is not Altivec optimized, and no one can really understand how a relativiely new application and product development team such as Ableton could not code Live with these optimizations. Anyone serious about developing real-time performance software should AT LEAST include Altivec in their code. I can't see any excuse why not - regardless of whether it's a 10% gain or 30% gain in performance it should be there. It's a hit we Mac lovers all have to take.


For years the Intel architecture has always been one step ahead of G4 in terms of price/performance. If that's what matters to you, get a PC.