Ableton Forum

Hi guys,

2 months ago i decided to buy live 5.0.1 (Upgraded laST WEEK TO 5.0.3) and a brand new Powerbook G4, 1.67ghz, 2gb Ram and a 7200rpm hard drive.Soundcard Emi 2/6.

I thought that i had on my hands system enough to produce some music without any problem but seems is not.

Just as an example, i´m working on a Live set which has only 9 chanels and is still at the clips view, it have a couple of Midi chanels with Operator and some effects but nothing to big to start giving me glitches and sometimes even stopping playback and reaching points of 90% CPU.

I´m very new on this but i think that this shouldn´t happen on the system i have........TOO MUCH MONEY SPENT ON IT!!!!

I´ve been working a bit with the audio preferences and i have noticed that the more i increase the size of the buffer the less glitches i get and i get the CPU ussage a bit down....BUT I HAVE TO INCREASE IT TO ALMOST THE MAXIMUM 2028 SAMPLES, which is not normal, isn´t it?

I REALLY NEED SOME HELP ON THIS, i´ve been reading a bit on this forum and saw some issues with Live and powerbooks.....but would apreciate if anyone has some tips & tricks to solve this problem a bit.

i dont think this is confined to powerbooks, a lot of wondows users have been having the same problems. A lot of us are hoping that 5.2 update will help with it.

Before I bought an audio only pc I was using a 1.8ghz with 2 gig of ram and was experiencing problems just like you speak of.

My new pc is 3.73ghz with 1066mhz front side bus and funny enough Live still uses between 60-80% on a regular basis. This is without freezing any tracks or bouncing any down to audio though.

Although I love live and have been using it since version 3 it does seem to get more cpu hungry with every release. Then again I normally do more with each release so this could be the problem:)

I know there are sites on the web that tell you how to optimize windows xp for audio performance. I did this on my old machine and it did help a little bit. Unfortunately I'm not sure if there is such a resource for macs. I'm sure there is, try running a search on google.

How many are 'a couple' of Operators? I can max out my iBook G4 with two or three plus a few effects if I try to.

Software synths are hungry, especially the good ones.

Thanks folks for your quick reply!!

I´ll have a look if i can find a site where optimize OSX for audio performance.

noisetonepause wrote: How many are 'a couple' of Operators? I can max out my iBook G4 with two or three plus a few effects if I try to.

I´m using 4 midi tracks (3 operator/1 simpler)

Try the same project,but with out the audio card,use only the build in audio card and see if you have problems.If you have not problems then you will know the problem comes from your audio card.Maybe the drivers are bad.

Try to download new drivers if you find any.