Ableton Forum

Hi! I experience audio dropouts at about 50% CPU load as shown by Live 5.0.3. Is this normal as in Cubase with the same setup of the audio driver I can go up to 80% without dropouts?

Thanks in advance!

Hey is this normal? Doesn't anybody know?

its normal.
live 5 is one big cpu hog!! none compete

I know...I get the same thing. I've been asking why for ages and no one seems to help

Same thing here

I wonder if this may be connected to the fact that when you have a project with several vst/vsti, but not playing anything Live shows about 0 to 1% CPU usage while Cubase shows the idle CPU usage of all the vsts and in Cubase it may go up to 20-30%. So may be Live just hides this idle CPU usage and does not add it to the overall CPU usage when the project is playing while Cubase adds it and hence the difference?

ecmjazz wrote:Hi! I experience audio dropouts at about 50% CPU load as shown by Live 5.0.3. Is this normal as in Cubase with the same setup of the audio driver I can go up to 80% without dropouts?

Thanks in advance!

What audio card do you have? Probably the drivers are not that good. I go over 80% without issues on a Delta 1010 or a Audiophile.

Yeah I don't think the two programs are reporting the same aspects of CPU usage.
I.e. "CPU usage" is defined differently.

Also, I've not made a study of it, but my impression is that audio dropouts can happen at different level of CPU usage depending on the kinds of things that are happening in the Live set.

An obvious example is when you drop certain VSTs into a track, you can get an audio glitch in a set that would otherwise run smoothly.
Of course sometimes you get no audio at all because Live crashes when you drop the VST on the track, but that's another story

I mean a project that I transferred from Cubase to Live so the number of VSTs, tracks etc. is the same and the load should be the same. I am not drawing any vsts during the playback - only playback of one single project... I use the onboard card of my laptop which is some kind of AC97 bulshit but I use it with ASIO4ALL which seems to be a very good driver to me and Cubase shows rather good performance with it..

ecmjazz wrote:...I use the onboard card of my laptop which is some kind of AC97 bulshit but I use it with ASIO4ALL....

Try with a 'pro' soundcard/driver, will probably fix the problem.

djastroboy wrote:Yeah I don't think the two programs are reporting the same aspects of CPU usage.
I.e. "CPU usage" is defined differently.

Try this: in both program, compare the CPU meter in the DAW to the CPU usage shown in the Task Manager. Are they the same?

SX3 runs fine here (Thank God for decent performance in one program at least)... idle cpu hardly registers anything
These are the things I hope ableton are looking at fixing first (Performance loss using Live and a very heavy program)
Anyone using beta? I am testing

i have this problem, too, but i think i figured it out. you said you were using a laptop and the cpu usage wasn't getting too high and that sounded familiar to me. i have yet to test my theory, but ok, here's the deal:

for live shows, i use(d) an ibook g4 1.42 ghz with 768 mg ram and an edirol fa-101 interface. i was going NUTS trying to figure out why sound was dropping out. i had original been using 8 of 1/4" outs on the edirol, so i thought that was the problem. i mixed everything as well as i could and used 3 outputs (2 for stereo l & R, 1 for click track to the drummer). that didn't work.

so i bounced everything down to 3 tracks. it worked for about an hour and then, bam, he said the click dropped out for about five seconds. 3 TRACKS did that. i tried to recreate the problem when not at band practice, but of course, i couldn't. i froze all of the tracks, clicked the 'ram' option on half of the clips, and the cpu didn't get above 35%. i thought for sure that i'd fixed it.

sure enough, two songs in, it dropped out. keep in mind i had no effects on any of these tracks, it was basically serving as a glorified 4 track machine. buuuut, this time the drummer noticed something - the little 'the hard drive can't keep up' light at the top right corner had lit up at the exact moment the click dropped out. what i didn't know was that the ibook had a 4200 rpm hd! boy was i an idiot for buying it.

but, my solution (at least, i think, i am going to try it this week, after i rearrange some stuff) is to put all of the live files on an external firewire hard drive. i have a lacie big disk that's 7200 rpm, so i THINK that will fix it.

so, to sum all of this up, maybe your hd is too slow?

have any of you tried this - http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/index.html ?
I havent yet but have heard some excellent feedback about it. might sort everyone out!

everyone has dropouts and CPU overdoses!!!

i hope that the engine will be less cpu demanding on 5.2