what runs Live better PC or MAC?

xzusa8ky · Post by **xzusa8ky** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 7:01 pm

Hi!

I am working on my G5 1.8 Ghz Mac with Live 4 and M-Audio Firewire 410 and got to say it rocks! Gonna buy a 6 Ghz Mac next year! Don't compare a G4 processor with a Pentium 4! You got to compare with the G5 processor, and yes it's faster than an Pentium 4! But it's much more about the programmers work! and it seems that Live for mac isnt written that well! But try Reason on a Mac if you want to compare a really good written program to Live and you will see that its more about programming than the the old war Mac or PC!.....

xzusa8ky

drush · Post by **drush** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 7:10 pm

yes, we know. the issue is Live's coding, not a platform debate. however problem is Live is the app we want to use.. and it runs a hell of a lot better on the PC. the 2 macs in my room notwithstanding.[/i]

bencodec · Post by **bencodec** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 7:57 pm

yeah, this thread is pointless. same as the last 8 ones like it.

can't believe it's made it to 4 pages.

j · Post by j » Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:05 pm

I'm just gonna keep calling out to Ableton to put some more effort into Mac optimization.

Nothing works for me the way Live does and I am hoping the money I've invested in Ableton will not be wasted in mediocre support for my platform of choice!

Please Abletons I know you can do it! Make Live run better on Macs.

peace!
j

MarkH · Post by **MarkH** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:43 am

You are not going to see increased optimization for Mac anytime soon. According to my conversations with some of their staff they are completely comfortable with Live's performance on Mac and do not feel they need to optimize it further based on our complaints. If there is future optimization, great, and maybe the Ableton developers will stumble into some ideas, but I'm not counting on it. We just have to wait for faster Powerbooks.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:19 am

MarkH wrote:According to my conversations with some of their staff they are completely comfortable with Live's performance on Mac and do not feel they need to optimize it further based on our complaints.

I had that exact same conversation with one of the heads of Ableton, and Urs Heckman, who wrote More Feedback Machine and Zebra.

Urs started jabbing the guy from Ableton about piss poor mac performance, and lack of AUor VSTi in Live. THe guy just said "gee? right now there is no optimization for either platform?", and two months later Live 4 comes out with a bit of a speed bump for macs, and full AU / VSTi support!
I wouldn't read too much into what a developer is likely not to tell you in the first place, you know what I mean? That guy Urs was dogging must have been squirming though!

Altivec enhancement isn't going to produce anything more than a 15 to 25% increase, and that might be why they haven't bothered, though it would be nice, it's not earth shattering.
Like I said before, for me, it's not the end of the world.

MarkH · Post by **MarkH** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:30 am

Machinesworking wrote:Altivec enhancement isn't going to produce anything more than a 15 to 25% increase, and that might be why they haven't bothered, though it would be nice, it's not earth shattering.

If Ableton would Altivec optimize the plugins that would be more than enough to give that "speed bump" well over 15-25%. Think about it, we use plugins all the time. Other DAW software like Logic has the plugins built into the software, just like Ableton does with Simpler, Impulse, Reverb, Redux, and so on, yet Logic is so much more efficient with its plugins. If Ableton would follow emagic's footsteps I think Live would perform a heck of a lot better.

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:35 am

Machinate wrote:
peterkirn wrote:How much you want for your PowerBook?
hehe, you see, mac users can't really take a hint. one guy's selling cuz he thinks it's a piece of crap, the next guy's all over it

heheh. jk. more power to ya.

a

at least I don't have to worry about my graphics drivers if I want my audio working

All the power in the world isn't going to change the fact that if you connect a WinXP box to the internet for fifteen seconds it'll be crawling with malware... just doesn't happen in OS X...

My laptop is a do-everything box, and I *need* internet access and the UNIX terminal and the reliability of Mac OS X.

-Paws

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:37 am

drush wrote:imagine how much a G5 powerbook is going to cost....

Compare the price of an iMac G4 to an iMac G5...

-Paws

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:33 pm

noisetonepause wrote: All the power in the world isn't going to change the fact that if you connect a WinXP box to the internet for fifteen seconds it'll be crawling with malware...
-Paws

Absolute pure unadulterated BOLLOCKS mate, I ve been running pcs connected to the net for YEARS now, never had a SINGLE problem. I had a virus problem ONCE, somebody passed me an infected cd rom and like a twat I didn't check it, MY FAULT.

I'm not going to get into this pointless debate, the figures and whinging speak for themselves but when somebody posts something as ludicrous as that I can't bloody help it

Sorry Paws, you must be having a bad day, and I thought it was ME giving up the fags. Still going BTW, practically chewed my fingers off last wednesday, but it seems to be getting a little easier now.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:50 pm

noisetonepause wrote:
Machinate wrote:
peterkirn wrote:How much you want for your PowerBook?
hehe, you see, mac users can't really take a hint. one guy's selling cuz he thinks it's a piece of crap, the next guy's all over it

heheh. jk. more power to ya.

a
at least I don't have to worry about my graphics drivers if I want my audio working

All the power in the world isn't going to change the fact that if you connect a WinXP box to the internet for fifteen seconds it'll be crawling with malware... just doesn't happen in OS X...

My laptop is a do-everything box, and I *need* internet access and the UNIX terminal and the reliability of Mac OS X.

-Paws

LOL! -- Ahem, dude [band quibble] try doing half the shit I do on my dinged up IBM on your ibook. Not gonna happen, mate.. And I've already told you the graphics issue was user error

[/band quibble]

Also: Do yo *need* anything, when it comes down to it?

forge · Post by **forge** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 2:00 pm

everytime this debate comes up, despite it's frequency I still do take a bit of an interest because I know there are a couple of things about my laptop I'm not totally happy with and I still kind of think I'd like to consider going the PB route. My laptop is becoming more and more like a musical instrument and there really is something about macs that feel better as a complete and well crafted tool, less a box of components

Lately I've been finding I start a track with a template with 2x audio tracks and 2x midi tracks and do as much as I can with that and then create new tracks as and when I need them (for re-sampling or whatever) then create alot of the sounds with my vstis and impulse etc - I find I dont clutter the mix with too much, give the sounds more space and importance and do more with the CPU power I've got. Load up a really hungry Absynth patch and as soon as I'm happy with it, resample into live then turn off the vsti. All I'm leaving switched on are FX and waves plugs Like L1, RComp and REQ - (although waves can be quite hungry!)

I rarely sequence external vstis without resampling and using them as audio - partly because you can do more with audio in live, and with the RAM function I can put all the strain on my 1GB ram which is not likely to have problems of overheating/fragmentation or whatever.

In other words - the more I get used to using Live 4 on a laptop, getting use to working with the heat and power strengths and limitations , I'm finding that the way I'm getting used to using it which seems to be most efficient is something that I could do quite comfortably on any of the more recent macs

toneroll · Post by **toneroll** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 3:14 pm

why dunt anyone here go on about desktops? all you mac heads here could buy a well cheap athalon based pc desktop and i mean for less than 500 dollars/pounds . you could use your firewire/usb interface on both, use the pc as a vst/i "lab" cook up some sounds then bounce all the files or tracks down then chuck em about in your laptop ( powerbook if you REALLY must) go live with them then , and maybe use all your low consumption vstis in that..... you cant get better than both worlds can you?
and also you could use this reason for getting a second license of ableton..
you just say "well i want to (do the above) coz mac optimisation stinks..
come on try it , you might like it .. then you can just sit on the fence and watch arguments like this run for 5 pages just laughin your tits off..

personally my next purchase is a centrino and im whackin a beast of an athalon in this one, as for security issues none to speak of here, you should know how to secure a WIN machine if your going to go on the net with it, setting up partitions takes care of this hassle anyways plus with the next 64 athalons and a nvidia nforce4 motherboard you might aswell kiss virus' bye bye.

thats me now, F£$^ this im going makin some tunes on the partition that doesnt connect........................

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:24 pm

guys, i'm as much a pc advocat / former mac user as you'll find but Paws isn't speaking Bollocks about the vulnerability of PCs on the net.

just last night i reinstalled XP Pro on my desktop, and after installing drivers for the wireless pci card, i basically had 10 minutes of vulnerability time between being connected to the internet and installing all the windows security updates.
once i got that all installed and rebooted, i moved my copy of Ad-Aware SE over to it via network and ran it... 13 objects (spyware and adware) were found. I never even opened a web browser. Of course it quarantined and deleted them.

Now Ad-Aware occasionally finds spyware and adware objects on my laptop as well. As i don't run the realtime "Ad-Watch" feature for the laptop, as to keep up performance for other tasks. And on the laptop i've never had a question of performance as in "am i infected?" , "my computer is slowing down!". Most of the time these suspicious "objects" are semi-invasive cookies. I wouldn't necessarily consider it "Malware" as its never been malicious or combative. But just because Norton says your machine is clean - doesn't mean its 100% hunky dory.

FYI everyone, you can download a free edition of Ad-Aware SE Personal here: Link to download.com
That free Personal edition scans for spy/adware and quarantines / removes it, but it does not have the realtime "Ad-Watch" blocker.

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:12 pm

Adamjay, you must have installed that spyware some other way, some stupid search bar or internet speedup utility for instance. ISP software like AOL is often one of the worst culprits. Keeping that stuff off your machine is a real no brainer, I really can't get my head around why people think it's such a problem. All you have to do is exactly what you said, run Ad-aware or Spybot just the once after installing anything mysteriously 'free' from some corporate company or porn site!!!!!, and it's gone. It's only statistic gathering crap anyway.

If you manage your cookies correctly, which involves just moving a slider in your security setup window, it's impossible for anything like you just described to get into your machine. It's worth setting your security to disable Java or offering a prompt to allow or not, and that's about it.

I can honestly say that I have been running this machine for years now without a single spyware problem (yes I do check for it occasionally) Mind you I'm STILL not on broadband yet

so it'd take 5 or 10 minutes for some cia man to place a nasty bug in my lil ol machine

what runs Live better PC or MAC?

Re: what runs Live better PC or MAC?