Ableton Forum

Hi everyone!

I'm having an issue with my DAW, which is Ableton. While working — regardless of project size, even with an empty one — the CPU usage occasionally spikes well above 100%, sometimes up to 400% (Ableton shows this in red in the indicated field). This of course affects the audio playback. However, when I check in Windows, the CPU usage is just a bit over 20%. I'm working on Windows 11. My computer has an Intel Core i5 13500 processor, and my RAM is Kingston Fury 4x32GB 5600 MHz. If more specs are needed, I’ll be happy to provide them. I initially thought it was an audio interface issue, as I was using a Steinberg UR22mkII and then bought a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 2 interface. Unfortunately, that didn’t help — the issue remained. I uninstalled and reinstalled Ableton, but that didn’t help either. I removed all ASIO drivers (I also have FL Studio installed) and reinstalled only the dedicated drivers for Komplete Audio 2. Still no improvement. I tried plugging the interface into different USB ports — no change.
My ASIO buffer size is set to the default value, which is 512 samples.
I checked my system with AIDA and everything seems fine. I also installed Quick CPU, enabled all cores, but that didn’t help either. The only things installed on the computer are plugins, FL Studio, and Ableton — and currently I’m only using Ableton. I don’t know what else to do. I would really appreciate any help — thank you!

Hi, not sure if you have tried these yet, but here are a few ideas. The spikes are probably not from anything you are doing wrong but from a windows service or driver deciding "I can just slip in here for a little bit and run my huge process. It"LL just be sec..."

Drivers are often a pain point. Make sure your audio card is using the latest proprietary drivers, not the default. Generally on these, you need to uninstall the default, unplug the audio interface from the computer, install the proprietary driver, the plug in the card. If you plug in the card first you get the windows generic driver. Networking drivers are often culprits. I turn of wireless. If can, turn off Bluetooth, unplug any lan cable. If windows has a route to phone home it probably will, so unplug and turn off any connections to the net.

There is a task scheduler that runs zillions of services once a day/hour/week whatever. Change the times for any of these that you can to when you are asleep and leave the computer on if feasible.

I forget where, but there is a setting to leave drives always on that prevents random drive waking which will cause glitching. Setting power mode to background used to help, not sure if it is still relevant. Dropbox is a huge pain. It can actually crash Live by trying to upload partially written files and locking writing while doing it. Ableton should maybe do this in the first place. If you export a large file, Dropbox also tries to upload these before writing is done. Close all browsers or keep an alternative browser like opera or Vivaldi or brave and keep open tabs to a minimum. Preferably, don't open a browser and close any open ones (see below) since browsers and web pages are often glitch culprits. Chrome seems to be the worst.

I uninstall as much unnecessary stuff as I can. Any ai, copilot, gaming, etc: all gets uninstalled. I have learned a few things to keep. I don't try to delete the app store. That led to a total OS reinstall. There are a lot of services that you can change from auto start to manual. Just try stopping the things if they don't seem necessary. You may have to do a little googling to see if a running service is necessary. If it immediately starts again try the pause trick below.

Search can't be removed or the service terminated without immediately respawning, but I turn off search in all drive property pages and the get the Microsoft free tool proc explorer if it still works in 11. You can't stop the search process, but if you pause it, that setting will hold across boots. Same thing for any adobe or other crapware that won't let you terminate without immediately respawning. The pause prevents the respawn. Proc explorer has another neat trick: right click on the Ableton process and go to priority and set it to realtime. This makes it harder for other stuff to butt in. If you do that a lot there is a command line that can be set up as a script. See below.

I have an out of date win 10 script that turns off services, terminates programs, and runs another daw-ish thing called bidule. The script is easy to understand and easily adaptable to live or other daws and automates some of this stuff and gives you the commands to do much of the above. It is at https://github.com/rcrath/bidoptimize.

Hello

Thank you so much for being the only one who replied – and for writing so much, too.
Honestly, I was hoping that someone had experienced a similar issue and would just give me a ready-made solution, because I’m really fed up with stumbling in the dark and guessing what might be the cause.

Recently, I even bought a dedicated graphics card, but that didn’t help either.
The bigger the project, even at the highest latency settings, I still hear occasional crackles, and the CPU usage meter in the top-right corner jumps like crazy.

I’m starting to think this might simply be a compatibility issue between the ASRock motherboard and Windows 11. I’m seriously considering switching to Windows 10, because, like I said, I’m completely tired of this trial-and-error process.
There are plenty of people using Windows 11 with Ableton without these kinds of issues, so at this point, I’m betting on some compatibility problem between ASRock + Windows 11 + Ableton.

Once again, thank you for your response and for taking the time.

Had basically the same problem until a few days ago.

I came across ThrottleStop, that enabled me to switch off C states without even tweaking the BIOS.
So far, so good !

Hey, thanks, I changed that option but unfortunately I still have the same issue.