Ableton Forum

Helle everybody,

I'm in the process of creating a Live Set with Ableton. In this live set I play guitar, vocals, drums (midi) and software synthesizer live. Unfortunately, this puts a lot of strain on the CPU and it keeps dropping out. The master signal then sounds like a bit crush effect.

I know I don't have the best computer and I want to buy a new one. That's why I'm wondering what I need to look out for when buying a computer so that I can run a complex Ableton Live set smoothly.

I welcome all hints and advice.

Gustav

Hi Gustav, we use a MacBook Pro M1 with 16Gb RAM for our live band. This handles four vocals, bass, backing tracks, four drum triggers, two MIDI controllers, DMX lights, drum racks, dozens of effects (Fabfilter gates, compressors, EQs, reverbs, delays, saturation, plus some Plugin Alliance compressors), two lots of monitors, MIDI click track and probably some other things. We never get above 30% CPU usage (buffer size 128 samples) and the MacBook doesn't glitch unless you push it to 80% and it has never crashed during a set. We get about 13ms of latency from our audio interfaces and nothing extra from the plugins, I can't fault it.

I hope that helps, happy to answer any specific questions.

Cheers