Ableton Forum

Ok, I'm trying not to get depressed.

I have a brand new powerbook 12". I love it, all my music apps (Digital Performer, Peak, etc) run better on this machine EXCEPT Ableton Live. I waited for a long time before investing in what I thought would be a good stable portable Mac. My intention was to make a good chunk of my mac-based music studio portable, AND to incorporate Live into my Electrix Repeater-based performances.

However, with Live I'm suffering from incredibly bad performance: CPU spikes (300%) while very few tracks are playing, audio drop-outs, global recording shuts itself off when CPU spikes (like every 5 seconds..)(p.s. yes, I've optimized all I can, am running nothing else, etc)

I just trolled through the forums, read other Apple user posts, read through and ran the "benchmark" test....and as a result I am now morose.

The messge I'm getting from this forum:

**Ableton Live is not optimized for Mac.**

Is this true? I think it must be, because how could I in Digital Performer be smoothly running 24 tracks of audio, plus plugins, all while recording in stereo, but then in Ableton Live choke on the playback of a measly 4 tracks of a short 4 bar phrase with no effects? (Not to mention other programs I run just fine, like Final Cut Pro, Illustrator, etc)

This is an amazingly powerful program and I want to keep using it. So, seriously, and without meaning to be snide, what are my options here?

1) Use my 3 Apple machines for everything else, and buy a PC for Ableton
2) Wait for Ableton to optimize for Apple (And, is this generally acknowleged a problem? Do they admit there is a problem?)
3) Wait for Apple to optimize for Ableton
4) Keep searching for a technical solution (Ableton folks, can you help?)

Please advise! Thank you very much.

I'm not sure what you're doing, but this is what I've got going at around 25-30% CPU on a dual Gig G4. Keep in mind Live 4 barely uses the second processor at all, in the Live 4 test my dual gets around 70% CPU compared to 82% for my 800mhz powerbook! You should be getting around 48% on a 1.5 powerbook.
( big third level cache on the 800 helps a bit I think, also it has a Gig of RAM )

OK:
6 audio tracks,
2 live audio inputs, ( moog and vocalist )
6 FX
3 soft synths

So yeah, do the Live 4 test from this site and see if the powerbook is performing up to speck in the first place I would say.

I am running an iBook G4 1 ghz with 256 megs of ram. I do the record and loop frequently. Yeah, sometimes a CPU spike will happen on my machine, but never to 300%. The spikes I get are around 70% to 80%. Of course, I don't have too many effects on the recording channel.

I'd say check your latency settings, driver versions, software versions, and other stuff.

well i havnt been on here for ages....simply coz my mac is working like a dream...

your problems are related to your set up im afraid...

in general, the pc is less prone to problems with live for sure...but if you max your ram, slimdown your system and set it up to make full use of your system, and use proper high quality soundcards i.e RME multiface, you will have no issues at all...

good luck

Yes, others have said this too. I've been recording efficiently (and problem free) on my Macs for many years (using MOTU and DP), so I understand the issues.

Again, my system is streamlined, for music only. My other music apps are running well. My only problem is with Live. That's what I don't understand.

Last night I added another 256 MB of ram to the existing 512 in my PowerBook and my performance has only slightly improved. I still suffer from audio drop outs. There is no way I would trust this on stage. I'll stick with the Repeater for now.

I would like to do a side by side performance test of on G4 tower and G4 PowerBook. But I've resisted installing Live in two places because of their confusing copy protection scheme. Don't you only get two installs? I've been worried that if the PowerBook doesn't work for me I'll need to install it a different performance-dedicated machine.

I should add, regarding test of G4 tower versus laptop: I have Live 4.0 on the powerbook and an old install of Live 3.0 on the G4 tower. Probably wouldn't be a fair comparison to run them against each other.

please ignore