Ableton Forum

Hi All,

I am currently running a 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 Macbook Pro with 4GB of ram and am jumping around 30% - 40% in my CPU load meter in ableton. I thought this too be pretty good considering I had about 8 tracks most or which were grouped into instrument racks with each chain having a couple plugins each. That being said, I don't want to put any unneeded stress on my laptop.

I have read that freezing and flatten tracks is a good thing to do if your trying to conserve CPU usage. The problem I ran into with that is that I have a lot of things sidechained. So to get around this I copied the sidechain compressor froze and flattened the track then re-applied the compressor after words. This seems to work fine, although if I have only 1 sidechain compressor applied to 1 instrument in an instrument rack chain, by freezing and flattening I am going to end up re-applying that sidechain compressor to the clip as a whole instead of just the one chain it was on before. This could be undesirable. Also, I realized that if I still have not arranged the song, I will no longer have use of, for example, an LFO speed knob for a dubstep wobble because the track will no longer be midi.

Does anyone have some solutions for me, should I even be worried about 30% - 40%?

Hi mate,

I wouldn't worry about 30-40%!

I would also say, freeze by all means, but don't flatten, it's not really necessary. When you freeze, Live takes an audio snapshot of your MIDI track and instead of doing all those calculations in real time when you play the track back, it will play this temporary audio file instead which take a lot less CPU to achieve. By flattening, you replace the MIDI instrument/fx etc with this audio file permanently. You will therefore lose your tweakability. If you leave it frozen, you can always un-freeze and tweak at any time before re-freezing.

There's not really any way round the side-chaining issue - other than having the instrument you'd like to sidechain on a separate track (you can just drag and drop the chain onto a new MIDI track to separate it from the rest of the rack).

Hope this helps!

Tom.

Thanks Tom. That does help alot.