Ableton Forum

It's been 4 business days and Ableton has yet to get back to me. So hopefully the community might be able to chime in.

I just bought a new 2021 M1 MacBook Pro. All my sessions were working perfectly fine on my old 2018 MacBook Pro, but now they are all glitching out from 75% - 200% CPU on this new computer. None of the sessions are functional without glitching and crackling.

I did a factory reset on both my 2018 computer and the new 2021 M1 Mac. No other plugins installed.. just Ableton. Installed Ableton 11.1.6. The intro song that loaded was reading out at 34% CPU on the new Mac and 5-7% on the old 2018 model.

Reloaded both waves and Soundtoys plugins on both sessions. The 2018 Mac was seamless, the M1 was unusable.

I took the computer into the Mac store and they did a full diagnostic finding nothing wrong.

All Waves and Soundtoys plugins are up to date. Contacted support and everything is installed properly.

specs:
- M1 MacBook Pro 10 core, 64GB, 2TB
- Ableton 11.1.6
- Mac OS Monterey 12.4

Did you check that Live isn't running in Rosetta mode (cmd+i on the app icon, there's a Rosetta option here, make sure it is unchecked)?
What buffer size are you using. For the most part, 128smpl seems to be the best setting on m1 machines.

Hey, it's not running in Rosetta mode. Buffer size is 1024 samples.

[jur] wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 01, 2022 5:48 pm

Did you check that Live isn't running in Rosetta mode (cmd+i on the app icon, there's a Rosetta option here, make sure it is unchecked)?
What buffer size are you using. For the most part, 128smpl seems to be the best setting on m1 machines.

Drop the buffer down to 128 then, and let us know if it helps.

Hey, I set the buffer to 128 and that seemed to fix it. I don't really understand why 1024 performs worse than 128 but I'll take it!

[jur] wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 01, 2022 7:30 pm

Drop the buffer down to 128 then, and let us know if it helps.

digorysmallz wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 01, 2022 8:42 pm

Hey, I set the buffer to 128 and that seemed to fix it. I don't really understand why 1024 performs worse than 128 but I'll take it!

For larger buffer sizes and low load, macOS determines that it can use the M1's efficiency cores to do the audio calculation, and it only switches to performance cores when the load hits certain thresholds, such as a low buffer size.

Hey, so went into the studio today and same thing. Crazy CPU spikes up to 200% with buffer set to 128. Ableton has yet to respond after 7 days...

When I set it to 128 yesterday it shrunk down to like 7-10%.

digorysmallz wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 01, 2022 8:42 pm

Hey, I set the buffer to 128 and that seemed to fix it. I don't really understand why 1024 performs worse than 128 but I'll take it!

[jur] wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 01, 2022 7:30 pm

Drop the buffer down to 128 then, and let us know if it helps.

Sorry, I forgot to ask about the obvious one: what's your audio interface?
Maybe its driver's not m1 compatible or you need to update it.
Did you try running on the mbp's internal sound card?

I have similar terrible performance and 128 samples seems to be the sweet spot but it still a poor performance for an M1 Pro + 32GB of Ram.
When I need to record it's shit latency, I get better performance on my 2014 i7 with 16gb of Ram.

My current M1 Pro can barely handle some 8 to 12 tracks with native plug ins. before being into the 40% range of CPU which was NEVER my experience on my way older intel mac.

...then something is wrong with your system...maybe old/wrong drivers for your interface?...maybe a faulty plugin?...

Yeah something else must be going on, there's a lot of us here with that exact same laptop not having any issues like that.

You may also want to try running in Rosetta and see if that changes things.

For whatever reason, I get tons of performance weirdness and hiccups when I'm in native M1 mode, that go away when running in Rosetta, and the performance is still significantly better on my M1 in Rosetta than on the maxed out i9 2019 MBP I was running before.

FYI this was mentioned by Ableton in another thread:

"For larger buffersizes and low load, macOS determines that it can use the M1's efficiency cores to do the audio calculation, and it only switches to performance cores when the load hits certain thresholds. With lower buffer sizes, macOS uses performance core more predictably. We're in contact with Apple about this issue, but it's unclear when / if we can improve this or if this requires a fix by Apple."

This might shed light on the underlying dependencies:

https://eclecticlight.co/2022/01/24/how ... -on-an-m1/

Users should file a request at Apple

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

with stating that pro users like to have full terminal control on running a process or app on desired CPU-cores at desired priority. This is a problem that can get fixed on system level by providing the appropriate unix-style means.