Ableton Forum

So. How's Ableton + Mountain Lion? Have they got Mountain Lion stable yet? I'm still on a Snow Leopard. Curious if I should upgrade.

I've had a few hiccups with the Virus TI2 plug, but otherwise Live 8 is rock solid for me on ML.

If your on snow leopard stay there.
Once you update you may not be able to go back.
And, Live runs better on SL.

I have no problems with Mountain Lion, but Live definitely taxes the CPU more.

Interesting... I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and my CPU use for Live went WAY down! Was awesome! The only thing I've noticed is the undo action seems to take a bit longer to execute. Pretty happy I upgraded.

I heard that mountain lion and nanokontrol would not work. anyone who can confirm?

No problems with ML here. Oner thing, you will lose all your Rosseta (Power PC emulator for Intel machines) applications. I had to upgrade to Office 2011 from my copy of Office 2004 for instance.

Some months ago I ran some tests with the set taken of the performance thread. On my Macbook Pro early 2011 (i7 Quadcore, 2.2Ghz, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) Live 8 (32&64bit) performs much better on Snow Leopard than on Mountain Lion. I tested this with the integrated and two different Firewire soundcards (Terratec Phase x24 FW & 24 FW).

I even have some Live sets that run much better on my Thinkpad x201 (i5 540m Dualcore, 2.53Ghz, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) with Windows 7 than on my Macbook with ML.

I highly suggest to install Mountain Lion on a separate partition or disk in order to be able to switch back to your old Snow Leopard when you don't get the performance you had before.

No problems for me and I run a virus ti desktop swell which is normally really buddy-no probs here. I was on leopard before so missed snow leopard and lion.

JuanSOLO wrote:If your on snow leopard stay there.
Once you update you may not be able to go back.
And, Live runs better on SL.

I have no problems with Mountain Lion, but Live definitely taxes the CPU more.

aioffermann wrote:Interesting... I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and my CPU use for Live went WAY down! Was awesome! The only thing I've noticed is the undo action seems to take a bit longer to execute. Pretty happy I upgraded.

What was the difference? Like 10% CPU, 30% or maybe 1-5%?

Maybe it has something to do with some kind of hardware optimisations - c2d vs i-core...

Here's what I posted at the "TEST RESULTS" thread.
However, my current Late 2011 MBP came with Snow Leopard.
I upgraded to Lion.
Getting back to Snow Leopard was a pain. It had to be a clean install of a later version of Snow Leopard to boot.
After getting things up and running again, I posted these results and was very happy.
After a few months or so, computer would NOT start up.
Tried installing Snow Leopard and it would NOT install.

I'm no computer expert, but a guy who I work with is, I guess.
He was saying something about firmware updates, late 2011 MBP's and Lion crippling my machine from getting back to Snow Leopard again.
Not sure how that works, or what really happened, but I could not get Snow Leopard back.
I threw in the towel and got a new SSD drive and installed Mountain Lion.
So far so good.
Prior to the SSD drive it seemed obvious that Lion was less responsive than SL. Not sure about ML prior to SSD.
Even opening a web browser or any app, just seemed to lag longer than it should.

That said, I am guessing that pending on which computer you have is more they key to getting proper results with SL.
If you have an early 2011, or earlier, I say SL all the way.
Anything later, ML.

JuanSOLO wrote:

JuanSOLO wrote:32bit
1. Ableton Live CPU Meter: 35%
2. Laptop/Desktop? Make/Model? MBP 15"
3. Operating System? 10.7.4 Lion
4. Ableton Live version? 8.3.2
5. CPU Make, Model, and Speed? 2.3GHz Intel Core i7
6. Amount of Ram? 4 Gb
7. Soundcard (and driver version if you know it)? Built in
8. Hard Disk Drive Speed (if you know)? 5400rpm
9. Number of playback tracks? 8

64bit
1. Ableton Live CPU Meter: 38%
same computer

I did get lower CPU results running my own drumRack test.

1) Ableton Live CPU Meter idles at 14%, peaks at 17%
2) Laptop/Desktop? Make/Model? Late 2011 MBP
3) Operating System? 10.6.8 (snow leopard)
4) Ableton Live version? 8.4.3b
5) CPU Make, Model, and Speed? 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
6) Amount of Ram? 4GB
7) Soundcard (and driver version if you know it)? internal
Hard Disk Drive Speed (if you know)? 5400rpm
9) Number of playback tracks? 8

MUCH BETTER. Should have never upgraded to Lion, it was a pain to get SL back on.

Zygi wrote:

JuanSOLO wrote:If your on snow leopard stay there.
Once you update you may not be able to go back.
And, Live runs better on SL.

I have no problems with Mountain Lion, but Live definitely taxes the CPU more.

aioffermann wrote:Interesting... I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and my CPU use for Live went WAY down! Was awesome! The only thing I've noticed is the undo action seems to take a bit longer to execute. Pretty happy I upgraded.

What was the difference? Like 10% CPU, 30% or maybe 1-5%?

Maybe it has something to do with some kind of hardware optimisations - c2d vs i-core...

I had a set where you would press play and it'd be going at like... 75% or something... Now it's down to like 20-30%... Crazy. Makes me really happy.

I upgraded directly from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. I have an early/mid 2011 Macbook Pro. I think upgrading to Lion must've been the step that fucked JuanSOLO up.

aioffermann wrote: I upgraded directly from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. I have an early/mid 2011 Macbook Pro. I think upgrading to Lion must've been the step that fucked JuanSOLO up.

This!

Apple have had a run of a mediocre OS then a good one for quite some time now:

Tiger- Solid

Leopard- Meh, a few niggles here than there.

Snow Leopard- Solid

Lion- Meh!

Mountain Lion- Solid.

I get better performance under Mountain Lion in terms of using all processors.
I tend to think that the current OS will probably be best for 64 bit, because Apple may invest some time into
Lion for performance under 64 bit, and definitly into Mountain Lion, but I seriously doubt anything will improve with Snow Leopard that way.

Machinesworking wrote:Lion- Meh!

You're being far too kind there!

Sage wrote:

Machinesworking wrote:Lion- Meh!

You're being far too kind there!

That's because I skipped it.
I have Snow Leopard on my old laptop, and Mountain Lion on the newish Mac Pro.

I also didn't upgrade to Live 8 until 90% of the people here were happy with it.
Already it's obvious that Live 9 is going to be a better .0 release.

I was happy with Mountain Lion when I received my new laptop. But today its decided it doesn't want to shut down until I manually close all open applications, suddenly getting clicking from my audio interface and couple of other little niggles. So going off it pretty quickly.

Got to use Lion a fair bit when a friend got a Mac for the first time last year and kept asking me how to use it and it was nothing but a headache.