Ableton Forum

This is well not intended to be an entire Logic Pro X VS Live debate, but I just want to share my opinion on CPU usage of Live.
In Logic I use numerous MIDI instruments (tracks) and CPU barely gets to 50%.
In Live, approximately same type of instruments hit CPU so hard that it starts dropping and clicking.

Why is Live so bad at CPU? At least for me. I run on latest MBP 15', SSD, 16 GB RAM.

Because Live is designed to be used.... live. There's a lot going on to make sure the app is as responsive as possible no matter what you might want to tweak. That just takes more CPU overhead to achieve that sort of immediate response.

Tarekith wrote:Because Live is designed to be used.... live. There's a lot going on to make sure the app is as responsive as possible no matter what you might want to tweak. That just takes more CPU overhead to achieve that sort of immediate response.

The lack of control over these aspects make Live not live up to its name. Where is clicks and and drop-outs totally unacceptable if not in live performances? Double stupid!

This so totally dumb! Get us partial freezing, support multiple machines, Dropping of notes and even whole tracks like a synthesizer does or rebrand Live as Ableton Futile are my suggestions to the development team.

You welcome to submit ideas to the development team in the feature wishlist forum, otherwise let's try to keep things a little less negative in other people's threads.

Tarekith wrote:You welcome to submit ideas to the development team in the feature wishlist forum, otherwise let's try to keep things a little less negative in other people's threads.

I do that when I can, like all the time, but this defense of ours is getting tired. It's time for Ableton to step up and improve performance (and they have done this to some extent, let's remember that). If the difference is small, like 15% or so that's one thing, not if it's twice the amount of instruments before crackles. That will always be unacceptable and if it's going to stand the reasons need to be adressed and openly declared. Because this is a topic that is always coming back.

Still, I wouldn't trade Live for any other DAW at the moment. That is so that even if performance really ought to be much better, I can produce more music I like with it than with other DAWs I've tried. This could change though.

There are no valid reasons known to me that dictates that Ableton Live performance needs to be at the somewhat dismal level where it is now. There are always ways to improve DAW performance and Ableton should continue to seek out and implement these.

I hate live because of this.