Help! I am losing my Mind. MacBook Pro M1

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
mattias800
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 05, 2024 7:41 pm

Re: Help! I am losing my Mind. MacBook Pro M1

Post by mattias800 » Fri Jan 05, 2024 8:10 pm

I have the same problem.

I have no idea what's going on. I've been using Ableton for 13 years with no problems.

Now I have a Mac studio with M1 ultra and 64 GB RAM.
No Rosetta, all Apple silicon native plugins. UAD Apollo x4 over TB3.

As soon as I open Ableton, even with only two tracks, it starts to lag.
It is not visible in activity monitor, CPU usage is not high.
CPU monitor in Ableton is also low (I know it measures processing time, rather than CPU load).

But still I get "CPU overload" warnings in Ableton all the time. All of Ableton stops at this point, for maybe half a second.
Saving a project can take half a minute. This happens all the time. When I do something, like add an effect or a note.
Loading an instance of Kontakt can take 10 seconds.
And it also happens when I play back the song.
It happens with plugins, and it happens with only stock plugins.

I was starting to blame the M1 ultra, thinking it was a scheduling problem in macOS when moving processes between the 2 SoC:s, or maybe when moving processes between efficiency and power cores. I read that decreasing buffer size forced the scheduler to use power cores instead of efficiency cores.

Nothing helps.

So I started a Bitwig trial period and recreated a small track, with identical plugins and tracks.
No problems at all, worked perfectly.
I tried it in Logic, worked perfectly.
I bought Reason 12 and tried that, worked perfectly.

I have no idea what Ableton is doing, but something is broken :(

Tarekith
Posts: 19121
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 11:46 pm
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Re: Help! I am losing my Mind. MacBook Pro M1

Post by Tarekith » Fri Jan 05, 2024 8:26 pm

You might want contact support and see if they can help you track down the issue. For whatever reason this isn't happened with everyone, so maybe there's something specific to your system still they can figure out:

https://www.ableton.com/en/help/

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