Ableton Forum

Hi Guys,

I have a question: Does an upgrade from 1gb RAM to 2gb RAm improves Live 3.1.4 performance dramatically?

I use a combination of Live with Reason synced (Rewire) to it. Audio of Reason is routed trough Live.

I'm still struggling with CPU spikes of more than 150% and an unstable (and many times unpredictable) Live System.

I'm NOT using ANY plug ins or the reverb effect, just a Live set of 210KB. Still sync between Live and Reason (2.5) is off many times. The red 'D' sign is NOT flashing.

And upgrading to Live 4 is not an option because my understanding is that it takes up even more CPU.

Any thoughts or anwers? Getting a bit desperate over here.....

Thanks in advance!

Martin - The Netherlands

OSX 10.3.9 / 17"powerbook 1ghz / 1 Gb Ram / MOTU 828mkII Fw.

i think all the ram in the world won't help if your Powerbook is only 1 mhz.


but really. you want better cpu usage.
get live 4. it uses less cpu on macs.

at least try the demo to see how much less cpu it is using with your sets,

was only to get your attention ......

1 Gig of memory should be more than enough to use Live and Reason together without worrying about running out of memory for most applications.

Myself, I am running 2 Gig on my system because I also do a lot of graphics intensive work on my laptop and the extra memory makes everything that much smoother.

What you ought to do is on your mac run top from the command line, or use some memory usage applet/control to see how much memory you are consuming under normal usage. You may find that if you are close to using your 1gb that 1.5 or 2gb would make a dramatic difference.

Also, as was mentioned, try the live 4 demo, it has some tweaks to make performance on the mac a bit better.

Without information to know specifically what you are doing to get your cpu up to 150%, or if you have tweaked any system settings for optimum performance... it may be hard for others to give you some feedback on a memory upgrade.

Good Luck...