Ableton Forum

This is so puzzling. I just bought the Live 12 suite upgrade a couple days back (from Live 9). Live 9 worked great on my Intel Mac mini i7.

On my M1, I created a project with a handful of RANDOM instances. The OS becomes unresponsive. I can't even quit live. I have to force quit it. But the CPU meter shows the perf cores are barely active. The CPU usage is low. Hot shows the temp is around 70 C, no thermal throttling. What gives? This isn't just the RANDOM plugin. I created another project with Ableton's built-in devices. With ~30 tracks, the machine is crawling.

Here's the project (the CPU meter shows 0% CPU, how??):
(hi res) https://imgur.com/a/zp8b7cT

What the heck is happening here? The buffer size window opens up in the top left corner:
https://imgur.com/saliyAw

A common issue people are having relates to the built in microphone on the MacBook having particular settings. It’s a very common issue, I don’t have a link offhand but a search should show others experiencing the same thing.

That is my first guess. I don’t know for sure if this is your specific problem, but a Lot of people who have been stumped have had that fix their issue. I think there was an external monitor thing at some point too. But the built-in mic noise cancellation one is the one that seems to be the main culprit.

yur2die4 wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 01, 2024 2:31 am

A common issue people are having relates to the built in microphone on the MacBook having particular settings. It’s a very common issue, I don’t have a link offhand but a search should show others experiencing the same thing.

That is my first guess. I don’t know for sure if this is your specific problem, but a Lot of people who have been stumped have had that fix their issue. I think there was an external monitor thing at some point too. But the built-in mic noise cancellation one is the one that seems to be the main culprit.

Thank you for those hints. I confirmed the mic settings are good. I also found issues with external displays, but mine seems to be different as the workaround (record screen in QT) does not work for me. I've tried just about everything. CPU is chill, but Ableton lags like crazy, utterly unusable.

Looks like I need to revert back to Logic/Cubase

Ok I've eliminated the following:
- External display: Disconnected the display from the dock and tried just the built-in display. 100% scaling.
- External sound card: Disconnected the RME sound card and chose the built-in audio output.
- QuickTime screen recording hack: Tried screen recording as some users reported success with this.

I've frozen all tracks. Same result. Live completely freezes, to the point of being utterly unresponsive.

The problem magically disappeared now!

All I did was unplug the dock, ssd, reboot, installed the latest live beta, opened the project (first in beta then in prod). No idea what fixed it, but it's kinda scary that this thing might hang anytime.

M1 Studio Ultra
64 GB
Sonoma 14.7.1


The same here. I posted before here: viewtopic.php?t=201040 due to that with every crash the green play button highlights.

I have since found out that every audio track is affected, regardless of which VST provider is there. At first I thought it might be a wrong MIDI interpretation, then later that some samples were crashing in some way when loading. I tried all sorts of things, but haven't found a solution yet. Since it affects all providers equally, I assume it's a bug in Live. The annoying thing is that sometimes I can work for two hours, then only for seconds. The restart also takes quite a long time.
Basically, the equipment should not be a problem. All samples come from external SSDs. The CPU is barely utilised and the memory pressure is high, but always in the green range.
The last thing I noticed was that if I move a MIDI note while working in the soundtrack (playing), it crashes immediately! Sometimes. It is an annoying sometimes bug.

Who's got any idea?