Ableton Forum

I have been doing my sets recently with Live (up to the latest beta for now hoping it would cure the problems below).

when i run live5 for prolonged periods of time on my powerbook, after about 2 hours i start developing cpu spikes and glitches in playback. i have nothing else running on the machine at the time and i wasn't recording my set because i was worried that was what was causing the issues.

i am using complex warping for a lot of my tunes, beat mode for the rest. the cpu usually hangs around 22% except when using delay or some sort of auto-filtering and even then the spike is minimal.

after the 1.75-2.0 hour mark, i start seeing cpu usage hang around 40% and spikes up to 90% and beyond. they are short spikes and not tied to controller movement, fader movement or any song event. in looking at my system resources, i still have about 300mb of ram free when this is happening, the disk drive light doesn't appear to be the issue and the cpu (as reported by the system) is hovering around 88-90%.

tonight i have another show and i'll see how it goes. i'm not sure what to do next however. i would think that this type of thing wouldn't happen as consistently as it seems to. i'll report my findings tomorrow.

any suggestions are welcome. is there anything you want me to try testing-wise?

i get this prob aswell, i find if i restart my com its o.k for about an hour......pain in the ass though

update:

during last night's show i had a set running for 3+ hours with no spikes using the latest beta. i can't say for sure that the beta was the fix. other things i did:

removed an eq4 and compressor from the master channel. i turned them off and on and they had no effect on cpu usage but i removed them anyway.

i turned off all items in the dashboard (using os x tiger) except for sys stats

restarted the machine and when it came up, killed all non-essential programs including airport etc. prior to starting live.

last time i saw the spiking issue, i was dj'ing i was using the digidesign drivers and using the mbox as my output source. this time i was going through coreaudio/built-in sound. the time BEFORE that, i was going through coreaudio/built-in audio however so despite the digidesign drivers sucking wind, i don't think this was the issue.


i can't think of anything different but i was happy with the result last night. it was a good show. i got worried when i starting hearing pops during one song but i think it was an issue with the mp3. it stopped after that song was over and it was ok after that. also, i checked the cpu use and it was very low and well-behaved.

if it happens again, i'll post back.

I have this problem with my powerbook as well

hey man I can't figure out how to turn off the stuff in dashboard. I looked around in preferences.

can you help?

I'm getting the same problem, I'm rehearsing with a band at the moment, Live works fine for a while but if we have a break when we start again it starts jumping around and freezing occasionally, a restart seems to fix it, but obviously that's no good in a live situation.
I get the feeling everybody who's getting this prolem is using a powerbook, or is that just me being lazy and not searching the posts thoroughly?
I've downloaded 5.02 and will try it tomorrow, fingers crossed for a fix.
If anybody's remotely interested, I'm using 10.3.9 and a motu 828, no controllers yet.