Ableton Forum

[nil] wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 16, 2023 4:26 pm

I am sry, that was a bit too optimistic, the smaller dropouts are still there,
but CPU load dropped for about 3 percent by the measures taken so far.

On the CPU meter, if you toggle "Warn on CPU overload" the indicator next to it will light up when Live has noticed a dropout. Is it toggled? Do you see it light up?

Thanx for your reply! Didn´t even know about these adjustments..
Yes, it was toggled, and no, it did not light up.

If it does you can check the CPU meter's "current" indicator to see if moves quite a lot from the average.

I trid that, and it moves a lot, but quite never above 22/23%.

I also tried another thing: I removed all nvidia drivers that did not come with my laptop.
The RTX 4050 is recognized even with no additional but the stock drivers:
The dropouts seem to be gone. I had a session of two hours today without any.
Maybe that is an advice to anyone else: Keep the stock drivers if you are into audio and not gaming..

So many people, including myself continue to have this issue. I can't believe there isn't a response by Ableton or a "fix" any where. Can anyone recommend a different forum where we could get some help? This post has been going since 2021 with no resolution.

Honestly, after investigating this a little bit: I don't think it is
caused by Ableton Live but system processing.

I think it's something to do with windows 10 antimalware/antivirus or something like that - try switching all that stuff off for half hour while you test it.

I get this weird behaviour when I start Live or Bitwig where my cpu maxes out for about 2 minutes.

When I first click "play" or "spacebar" both programs do nothing for about 20 seconds then glitch and after that everything is back to normal.

It wasn't like this until about 6 months ago...

Hey Ian.
Did you updated recently Live from a pre-11.3 version ?
Since Live 11.3, there's a new warp algo and Live rescans all audio clips in order to generate new .asd files for them.
On some systems it can freeze the computer because of ressources use.
And there were also many other issues with 11.3 that are supposed to be fixed in the last 11.3.10 update.

I've been dealing with this problem since building a new workstation in April. Only recently did I upgrade to Live 11, but nothing changed, so I submitted a ticket on Monday and haven't heard anything back yet.
Windows 11, Intel i5-13600K, 32GB RAM, and an Intel Arc A770, which might raise some eyebrows but doesn't seem to be in anyone else's system who's having this issue. My audio interface is a PreSonus Quantum 2626, a thunderbolt interface, which has two expansions bringing the total in/out to 26/26.
I've noticed that when trying to record an occurrence of this with OBS, it has mitigated the problem, until today. CPU is often spiking above 1000% (one thousand percent) in Live while task manager reports about 5% usage. It doesn't seem to matter what my block/buffer size is set to, if it's 32 or 4096, doesn't make a difference. The session I'm trying to work with today currently has four tracks and two EQ plugins.
I should mention everything was fine with Live 10 on my old machine, with the same audio interface - Windows 10, Intel 6700K, 32GB RAM.
Now, for others with a PreSonus thunderbolt interface, this might help you: In Universal Control, if I go to Settings, then Options, in the General tab there is an option to "Enable optimized PreSonus power plan for Thunderbolt audio streaming". With this option enabled, Live behaves much better, with the caveat that my CPU is pegged at 100% which makes the fans very loud. Not ideal for a studio environment, but it's something. Maybe this information can help somebody, hopefully the developers too.
Anyway, this is really frustrating. This isn't some hobby for me, it's what I do to make money. It's disheartening to see a bunch of stuff I don't need and will never use in the release notes, while this problem isn't being acknowledged here or, apparently, by support.

What kind of graphix card do you use?

I have encountered that running Live "as administrator" using the context menu for launching it, improves the performance, specially when swtiching windows.

Have you tried this by any chance?

Tried here, no difference.

IMO the most constant persistent reason for CPU spikes with any DAW is some third party VST plugin acting up. Recently Native Instruments have had massive reports of the latest versions of Kontakt and Komplete Kontrol spiking and crashing multiple DAWs, and they aren't the only potential guilty party. It's the major setback to VSTs in general that when you have dozens or hundreds of them installed it becomes a guessing game on which one is the culprit.

The obvious first step is to look at the third party VST plugins in the project that is spiking starting obviously with the track that is spiking. It's very possible it's a specific plugin that's causing this, which make much more sense in terms of things Ableton might miss or be out of their control in betas. I had an instance of Battery that would crash Live years ago and it was only fixed by an update from NI.

Are you guys using nVidia GPU?
If so, it might help to use "Studio" driver package instead of the "Gaming", just because it should offer overall better stability.
Other than that no idea, hoping this might help somebody though.

I tried that, too, no positive influence on the spikes.

Complete Fresh install Win 11, all updates. Live 11 latest, no third party plugins.
Issue is - the same!.
BTW: Using Bitwig also gave me some spikes..

Machine should be ridiculously fast: i9-13900HX with RTX 4050 GPU, RME UCX, up to date,
RME Babyface pro alternative: no difference°!

I tried _all_ optimisation suggestions of the Audio FAQ, no difference
to the default install at all.

I will try Live 10 now and see what happens..

Same here. Live was plenty of juice yesterday, with reasonable CPU usage for my 'old' intel MBP16 (Ventura). But today, same project, it's unusable because of CPU spikes. Something is rotten in the state of Ableton...

As i mentioned before: error analysis hints to an OS failure
as it happens with other daws, too.