Ableton Forum

Hey, I recently upgraded from a Core 2 Duo E6750 to a Core i7 860 with 4GB RAM. I have reinstalled Windows 7 and installed Live 8.1.5 and am experiencing very bad CPU performance. As an example, the set I'm working on right now has 15 channels and 3 returns (only CPU heavy plugins such as reverbs on returns, the rest are almost all only audio), and the Live CPU meter is sitting at about 50%-60%. Then in the Task Manager and Resource Monitor, Live 8.1.5.exe is not even at 10% CPU usage! At this point I'm also getting clicks and other audio glitches. My audio interface is an Edirol UA-25.

I thought I would be able to find solutions to this problem by searching the forums, but there seems to be a lot of people having a similar problem with no solution.

I've done the following to troubleshoot:

Disabling multicore/multithreading had no noticeable effect.
Running a full defrag across all drives had no effect.
Disablind Windows 7 Aero had no effect.
Using MME/DirectX as opposed to ASIO had little effect (other than huge latency).
Increasing ASIO buffer size by 2x (from 288 to 576) made a very small difference.

I'm desperate to find a solution to this! Any help is highly appreciated!

whats your sample rate set to? I experience higher cpu usage with higher sample rates, as there is more for the CPU to do...have you recently started using higer sample rate than you previously have?

You could try some workarounds in the interim, such as bouncing down/freezing tracks, or decreasing the "real time" sample rate for any instruments that allow you to select between real-time vs. offline/render oversampling

I have the sample rate set to the exact same value as when I was using a Core 2 Duo - 44.1khz.

I have been freezing tracks as a quick fix but I can't even work on stuff if I'm unable to run more than a handful of effects at the same time.