pops and glitches whilst running live

[pacmaniac]

HI there guys relatively new to this forum - im running live 7 on a 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook with 768mb of ram and its starting to pop and crackle a bit when live is fully loaded with effects and compressors etc - im not using any external soundcard, is there any way i can improve the settings on my laptop so that this doesnt happen as much or am i needing an external soundcard? the cpu usage indicator up the top right corner goes to about 65% - can anything be done to improve this and give me flawless sound?

thanks in advance.

[pacmaniac]

anyone?

[pacmaniac]

do i need an external soundcard to run this with my mac, and if so what one?

[wiffbi]

I think there is something in the manual about audio computing/performance in general. It is a good read and covers things like latency and buffers, etc. So increasing the buffer/latency should help, but also freezing tracks (especially in Live, where you can still mock around with the track/parts themself) is a good way to reduce CPU consumption.

[pacmaniac]

does anyone else get these problems and how do you go around fixing them???

[8O]

HI there guys relatively new to this forum - im running live 7 on a 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook with 768mb of ram and its starting to pop and crackle a bit when live is fully loaded with effects and compressors etc - im not using any external soundcard, is there any way i can improve the settings on my laptop so that this doesnt happen as much or am i needing an external soundcard? the cpu usage indicator up the top right corner goes to about 65% - can anything be done to improve this and give me flawless sound?

thanks in advance.

From memory when I had a G4, I would start running into pops/crackles at around 50% CPU usage too. I increased the audio buffer a bit, but in the end I had to look to reducing the number of tracks/effects and/or freezing tracks to get it sounding ok again. As far as I can remember, adding an external audio interface (MOTU Ultralite) didn't help that much. What helped massively and made Live usable again for me was moving from a Powerbook to a MacBook Pro... the performance improvement was incredible.

[pacmaniac]

oh dear... more money

[trilo]

Seems to me you're light on both memory and CPU power. No easy way to combat the problem, since boosting the CPU means a new computer, and boosting the memory means extra cash and possibly getting a tech to do it for ya. You can try playing around with latency, but I doubt that or adding an external audio interface is going to do much to help. At least it didn't when I was running into the problem on my old PB G4 (and that bugger had 2GB memory). You need to either lighten the CPU load, or increase capacity to carry a heavy load.

The good news is, even the white plastic MacBooks out there will vastly outperform what you're using now. And if you can get into one of the MacBook Pro's, you'll be in hardware heaven.

[leedsquietman]

a g4 mac powerbook will not run Live 7 very well, your specs are very underpowered. Upping the audio latency buffer and getting the RAM up to 2GB (if it allows it) will help a bit, but realistically, you have got to look to upgrading to at least a Core2Duo Intel system, with a minimum of 2GB ram and preferably with seperate graphics not stealing system ram - the MacBook Pro is the best way to do this if you will only look at Apple products, or a comparable windows PC laptop i.e. Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz and above processor, 3GB ram minimum, pref a 7200 rpm internal hdd with 250 or more GB etc and Nvidia 8600 or better graphics.

The other thing to consider is if you are using an external audio card because you need multiple input/output or just want better s/n ratios etc is that the aluminum Macbooks do not have a firewire port. The white plastic Macbook does, and the Macbook Pro has a FW800 port (you will probably need to get an adapter as many FW interfaces only run at FW400). Most PCs have the mini FW port, but unfortunately, most of them run cheap integrated FW chipsets that don't always work well. So you might have to consider USB 2.0 or expresscard options (not many expresscard options).