Ableton Forum

Or am I the only person stupid enough to try?

Im getting slaughtered by massive CPU overloads in Live 6.0.9 ... when playing all is happy at around 40-50% CPU, then as soon as I interact with it in anyway, or even some automations - CPU jumps to 120-130% (not quite sure how it gets to >100% but never mind).

TBH I dont even have *that* many active tracks or plugins, running a 3.6GHx dual core PC system. Total tracks in this project is 60, of which about a dozen are pure routing tracks for submixes and some have a plugin on them. There are 4 sends - they route to audio tracks and have nothing in them.

All unescessary sends are disabled, there aer a load of disabled midi and audio tracks (they get used for driving synth p[rior to bounding to audio.)

A similar track setup in Cubase 3 SX or V4 barely causes a ripple on CPU use on this computer.

WTF is wrong with Live?

Do disabled tracks still consume loads of CPU? I noticed that even through greyed out there indicators are still doing things.

What about disabled plugins?

Does live has some real problems with it UI performance? It seems that everytime I click on it anywhere all the audio goes to hell, live literally grinds to a halt and everything is distorted to hell, CPU use in Live is reading 130% or eventually.

This is the first time Ive tried working on a fairly compex track with Live - so far its a f****** disaster - feel like someone wrote it in VB or java or something equally stupid.

BTW - while typing this post, and leaving it not playing, CPU use reported in Live has dropped to 11% - I assume thats just bassline overhead for wherever audio routing and signal processing plugins are active.

Im not using any soft synths, though Sylus RMX is on a disabled track and the plugin is disabled - I allready bounced it to audio, same with TI Virus control which is now disabled after bouncing it tracks to audio.

Other plugins in use: 3 x ableton ping pong delay, ableton reverb x 2, a couple of abletom compressor 2, a couple of EQ3, a few EQ8, 1x fabfilter pro-c, 1 x fabfilter volcano. There are no audio routing or midi routing loops. 4 audio outs, 24 audio ins, (not in use), about a dozen MIDI in and midi out ports enabled. All active tracks are on zero latency comp - I jus have a few disabled, but timing adavanced midi tracks.

Underlying PC 1066MHz memory bus, 10000 RPM Raptor HD for the audio projects drive - recently defragged, loads of spare capcity, no detected crap running, unnessarily services disabled or scheduled for middle of the night etc. Graphics cards is some nVidia 7900 GT PCI express thing driving a huge screen.

This is really really pissing me off. I moved to live 6 in the first place because Cubase v4 was buggy as hell when it was released... and now this??? FFS!

Oh yeh - HD overload light isnt lighting up until *after* its goes into meltdown. Is Live particularly bad at streaming auidio from HD? I do notice that it is acessing the HD alot which is odd considering there is about a gg of unused memory in my PC - why cant ableton use that for memory caching of audio???

Does this sound symtomatic of any problems that anyne else has experienced? Does Live get really messed up when there are alot of routing only audio tracks perhaps?

ta for any help...

Same for me. Nothing you can do other than inconvenient pedantic work-arounds, which I don't do. For some of us, It simply won't follow our flow. That said, I strictly write in Live for creative creation only. A few tracks, almost no plugins other than the freaky ones and i'll record those mostly. When i've found the vibe and tempo, it all goes into PT where I even time compress my original tempo clips offline w Speed or Pitch n Time. Warp rarely ends up in my master tracks. My tracks sound really good and Live is certainly part of the process, but very simply and early in that process. You'll be much happier if you follow the same tact.

Here's one done that way. Good luck.

http://www.mixtmusic.com/2007/01/23/04-_-maybe-i/

yeah i agree completely, its one part of the program that is very annoying.
I think i am going to experiment with exporting to another program but for me its hard to get to a point to do that, im still changing things in the song even when im near to the end of the mix
im gutted to hear you can still be struggling on a computer like that

Well, I still go back and forth between the programs. I'll get near the end and want to try some new loops, pitch tricks, beat-repeat, etc. So, I'll render a few things in PT like a two track for ref, any audio bits to manipulate, then drop it into Live and get my freak on, then back it goes. I've gotten pretty speedy at it. The only thing you need to commit to is a tempo to make it all flow. There was one time I didn't like the tempo I chose. Fine, back I went, used good offline time warpers on any audio, kept my midi plugs and sounds handy and got it where i needed it. For me, It's still way better than keeping it in Live.

50 tracks in my newest track....

get a powercore if you want more plugins...

YILA wrote:50 tracks in my newest track....

get a powercore if you want more plugins...

Nice!, tell us about it when you got a min.

Like, do the same vst's sound better than native? or is it simply less taxing.

Yes they sound better, because they can use more power...they also cost allot more!....i run two powercore cards in my studio most of the plugins dont use the computers CPU at all....

Khazul wrote:Do disabled tracks still consume loads of CPU? I noticed that even through greyed out there indicators are still doing things.

What about disabled plugins?

Muted tracks consume the same cpu they would if they were unmuted. There is strictly speaking no way to disable a track in the sense you probably mean; the closest would be to hit the track stop button in session view (and use return to arrangement to re-enable). This would be painful with a lot of tracks, may be easier to freeze and mute.

Disabled plugins don't consume any CPU (and disabled racks automatically disable contained plugins, if you need a quick way to do this.)

Are you using live's freeze features? (It actually sounds like you may not be...worth checking out.)

Khazul wrote:I do notice that it is acessing the HD alot which is odd considering there is about a gg of unused memory in my PC - why cant ableton use that for memory caching of audio???

You might try the RAM button in the clip view, if you want clips to be cached in RAM. It's hard to tell whether this will actually help you or not -- your disk is very fast, suggesting whatever is causing the slowdown is something else.

hi i've got a powerful-ish pc (a MiKO)

when i get into heavy mixing, w lots of tracks, i usually find there is some major CPU relief if I increase the latency of my soundcard.

I dug around really quick and might have missed it BUT,....how much RAM you runnin' in that PC???

I used to have a 2Ghz iMac with 512 mb and it ran decent sized projects 30-45 tracks

THEN i went to 2gigs and that allowed me a session with over 75 tracks including 8 Aux's with most tracks having at least an eq or filter of some sort.The Aux's all had either delay,'verb,panning trick's,or something else on them..

Sounds like you got the horsepower in that PC just make sure to FILL IT WITH RAM!

If it's already full use Aux's more and commit to something on your audio track(flatten).....along with the usual increase buffer turn off warp when not needed yada
yada yada.....

Make adjustment's....

Thanks for your comments all


PC is WinXP+SP2 2Gig RAM (hence my comment above about having a gig spare), 1066MHz RAM, intel Dual Core 3.66Ghz CPU (proper dual core, no HT), PCI-express motherboard, a varierty of SATA hard drives with a WD raptors (10000rpm) on the OS and audio hardrives. Others used for main storage drives. Has a decent nvidia graphics board as well, fast, but NOT one of the top of the range gaming orientated bus hoggers.
Audio interface is Yamaha mLan (firewire - 01x+i88x - 24in, 16 out), MIDI is Edirol UM880.

So not exactly a slouch of a machine or audio setup

BTW - I tried moving all the clips manually into RAM - thanks for that - - it helped a bit, but as expected, not much really. God knows how I had not thought of clicking on that - guess as a software developer writing good caching code aint hard, so the thought that someone might have made it manual never occured


After going through disabled plugins one by one - Im starting to think its the Ableton reverb plugin thats the cause of this - hard to tell TBH. There if definately somthing in Live where is the CPU use is relative high (35% or more) and you do something that requires it to think abit - opening a plug window, editing an automation etc, then the little stall can send it into temporary audio overload from which something never recovers properly until you stop everything and little it settle for a couple of mins, or go round zeroing the feedback levels on delays and reverbs. Wierd!

I wonder if ableton have ever followed the window developer guidelines and tested it under high CPU stress conditions? Actually I wonder if anyone does that these days - driver developers for eg...??


BTW - I said this was the most complex track Ive tried working on in Live, but I have done a 90 min DJ set on it with loads of complex transitions where it became more practical to stick each audio track on its own track rather than the usual A/B + clips setups alot of people use for DJing - Also had stylus RMX and Virus Control running - was kind of DJ set + remixing/mashups etc...

That had alot of tracks in as well (40 or so audio?), but it was absolutely fine - they key difference, there was never more than 5 or so audio tracks (for some of the complex mashups + transiitons) + RMX and VC midi+plugs, and I guess I want runnign as many FX chains, and the audio routing was simple - just a pre-master mix bus for effects etc and a bunch of sends.

I've found the reverb and compressor 2 to be the biggest cpu hogs.

I tend to 'bounce' to stereo tracks after 15 or so tracks. I then delete most of the tracks and keep recording, using the 'stems' in the final draft- but i tend to use it more as a multitracker in arranger than loops in clip, so I'm processing long files of audio all the time.

Freeze was a godsend in 5 and has only gotten better in 6 as you can change some of the parameters now.

anyway this is my first post- hey y'all.

Hello,

I've got a similar problem here, but with far less tracks.
I'm using Ableton Live 6 with a MacBook Core 2 Duo & 2 giga ram.
Sometimes, when I'm tweaking some plug-ins pots the CPU overload (>100%)suddenly for 1 or 2 seconds, while my project are normally between 20 and 30 %.
Really bad 'cause I'm trying to make live performance...

I could be wrong, but I believe Live's high CPU usage is due to the fact that everything is done with realtime gapless audio. Other DAWs can look ahead slightly to reduce the load as they don't have to respond to everything as quickly.

I know this doesn't help, but I think it's the reason you can't run as many tracks as on other DAWs.

that sucks man
i'm also running into cpu problem especially when scoring to video

on a dedicated 2.2 C2D XP pro with 2G ram 5400HD desktop system, with all the bullshit turned off. m-audio fw 410 with a 256 buffer setting

recently i scored a 30min movie
that had around 20 track count, most of which were long audio takes
i was pretty reasonable with plugins
and i used freeze function a lot
but i had to freeze EVERYTHING to make a proper bounce
i tried setting the buffer to 512, and that helped only a tiny bit

maybe somebody out of Ableton camp could give us a hint?