Ableton Forum

shit i wonder if this is my problem too. Live CPU likes to jump to oh say, 700% for a few seconds every so often. sometimes it'll jump only to 150% if i'm nice to it. i'm on a 12" PowerBook RevA. wtf?

for me live and panther works real cool, until i've tried to sync it on my 909 (909 as master) - by the way no problems with that, but: and connect the 909 into the line in (build-in sc) feed it thru ableton to put some fx on it. this runs for 10 to 15 min than live chrashed.

by the way i was very very satisfied with the timming of this setup!! cool work - much better in live3!!!!

now i'm going to try back on os9.
can anyone test this on jaguar (maybe with another drummachine)??? - i dont want to install it, i've no space left on my hd.

Just got some new Samsung ram chips and while I no longer suffer from the "Live has unexpectidly quit" messages (thankfully), when going beyond 15 audio tracks Live starts to go haywire. CPU reaching 78% on average, and bypassing the effects doesn't do any good either. My tempo actually begins to fluctuate as the processor can't keep up. I didn't realise Live was not optimized for G4's, I found this out in the relevant "wishlist" section of the forum, what a shame. Very poor performance on Panther 10.3.2......

I'm running Live 3 on Panther with a 1.8ghz g5. In general it's very stable and rock solid. The only time it ever crashes is with a certain plugin that I didn't pay for but even that is very predictable.

BUT: it's a total cpu hog. I don't think I've ever had more than 8 tracks going (with a couple of plugs on each track). The annoying thing is when it gets up to around 60 or 70% cpu usage it starts to get sketchy with the audio dropping out and occasional tempo glitches like someone mentioned here. I'm using the PSP masterQ and delay plugs which are pretty cpu-heavy though.

I haven't used a previous version of Live or tried it on another machine so I didn't know if this performance was unusual or just typical.

My panther equipped IMac G4 is also giving me trouble with live, so much that i'll be using a G3 powerbook for performing ( it plainly is more stable). As some of you i installed Panther as an upgrade from 10.2, this may be the cause of problem. But than the G3 just seems to be more stable, even though it runs short on processing power quickly. As you guys mentionned, could it just be that live has issues with G4s ?

I've officially given up on Live for the time being, at least until they can optimize it for the G4.

Additionally to all the other issues in Live, now while the song is playing, if I bypass an effect like the reverb, and re-engage it, bang, it all comes to a grinding halt. Clicking the mouse in the interface generates response, except for the Play button and the spacebar is numb as well, forcing me to quit an re-open (this can happen 2 or 3 times in an hour). I've given up sending Ableton any emails as they never respond (not to me anyway, oh well). I've concluded that Live is wonderful if you can keep your set as streamlined as possible with your audio tracks consolidated to bits into the Session view for live performances. For those - like me - who were hoping to use it as their main sequencer (using efx freely and with peace of mind), forget it, won't happen on an a spanking new G4 laptop anyway.


I just ordered Logic Pro and I'm looking forward to learning it. Perhaps I can soon re-kindle my love with Live and use it with the same enthusiasm I once had.

On my powerbook (see my signature) I had a short test with panther. The pbook originally came with 10.2.7 but i installed panther with a clean install, on an erased HD. I thought I got a world record-ish cpu ussage with 442% but I see some got higher !
After two days, getting particularly bad results with Live and Digital Performer (I had at least to double my buffer sizes to get my projects to play), even Reason felt a bit sluggish, I came back on jaguar. And I'm much happier now !!

Random Audio Dropouts is happening with many of the users.
No it doesn't have something to do with the buffer size nor RAM. People with the latest
Powerbooks, people with the latest OSX, people with latest 828mk2 users, are all
complaing about this RANDOM AUDIO DROP OUTS !
This problem has not been fixed for a pretty long time, and people are still complaing.

Check out the forums.
Amazing how everyone is still having the same problem.

DO NOT USE LIVE4 ON STAGE !!
or you will get a very loud RIP from the SPEAKERS.
i repeat,
OSX, MOTU USERS, DO NOT USE LIVE4 ON STAGE.
untill ableton decides to fix the bug.