Ableton Forum

Hi, I use a new Macbook Pro and I wonder wy the performance is worse than on my G4. Got to find out why. It´s about Latency and CPU, using internal Sound. Can anyone join to this?

What version of Live are you using?

[quote="Tarekith"]What version of Live are you using?[/quote]

6.0.10, of course, no matter with or without external audio I can´t put the latency under 16 ms allover. In Logic, I can go to 2ms.

16ms total is still pretty damn good!

Good for what. Do you play guitar? No. Do you play keyboards with native software? Not easy with 9 ms. Do you use final scratch? Ok, if you just arrange your clips, it´s pretty damn good. But, what about 4ms allover with Logic on the same machine?

logic knows what it's going to play before it plays it.

live doesn't.

That´s not the reason, because my old G4 works properly with 4,2 ms Latency allover

m.Lo wrote:Good for what. Do you play guitar? No. Do you play keyboards with native software? Not easy with 9 ms. Do you use final scratch? Ok, if you just arrange your clips, it´s pretty damn good. But, what about 4ms allover with Logic on the same machine?

Actually I've been playing guitar for longer than anything else, about 16 years now, and my main piano is NI's Akoustik, which I use almost daily. I still don't think anything under 20ms is worth worrying about. If you think that much latency is too much, I don't think you're ever going to be happy with computer based production.

Tarekith wrote:
Actually I've been playing guitar for longer than anything else, about 16 years now, and my main piano is NI's Akoustik, which I use almost daily. I still don't think anything under 20ms is worth worrying about. If you think that much latency is too much, I don't think you're ever going to be happy with computer based production.

Well Tarekith, with all respect I think m.Lo is wondering why he can't set a latency of 4 ms in Live6 on his brand new Macbook Pro when at the same time he can do it with Logic AND also with Live6 on his *old* G4 titanium laptop.

I wonder too...

Peace
B

The onboard audio on the macbooks does not achieve as good latency values as the powerbooks used to do - that's a genral fact and a problem of the used onboard chip - what i'm interested in is: what kind of audio interface are you using while getting 2ms in logic? Is it a theoretical value someone told you or did you experience it yourself? If so, please tell us the audio interface you're using as this is technically not possible with the onboard sound of the macbook.

cheers,
dom

Then I don't understand this :

m.Lo wrote: ...no matter with or without external audio I can´t put the latency under 16 ms allover. In Logic, I can go to 2ms.

m.Lo, is this with G4 laptop or MBP ?

Thanks

Dear folks, now I answer all the questions of yesterday: I use a G4 desktop mac from 2001 with a sonnet processor of 1,2 ghz. with internal sound at 16bit. That way I can easily play the most of my software instruments at 45 samples / 2.1 ms. So I wonder why a brandnew macbook pro can´t do this job. The best I can play is 8,2 ms. at 20bit/48khz. When I use 24bit/96khz the latency goes down to 4.2 ms but the CPU breaks down. So, normally on the G4 I use 6ms, because I have many tracks and power-using racks. On the book it´s not makeble, so I have to live with this problem, especially when I play rythm guitar (what I do for 35 years now) or triggering drums it´s hard to stay in time. So i have to think about hardware now... What I told about Logic is what I heard from a Apple-Service-Center specialized on audio. They used a macbook w. internal sound. For my own test about external sound I used a m-audio audiophile firewire 4/6. Its only pushing from 18 to 16ms allover Latency. Your´s M.Lojavascript:emoticon('8O')

What I would like to know is why is performance on my Macbook pro 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo not as good as it was on my old 1st Gen Macbook 2.0 coreDuo?
Theres soemthing fishy going here with Macbook Pros and Ableton, there seem to be ALOT of people with performance problems with Macbook Pros on this forum.......

[quote="bleepsnbreaks"]What I would like to know is why is performance on my Macbook pro 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo not as good as it was on my old 1st Gen Macbook 2.0 coreDuo?
Theres soemthing fishy going here with Macbook Pros and Ableton, there seem to be ALOT of people with performance problems with Macbook Pros on this forum.......[/quote]

I´ll try to get a stetement by Apple...

get a proper audio interface, the inbuilt audio, just as in PC laptops, sucks. Just because it has an Apple badge doesn't make it any better, just like Dell, Toshiba, Sony, HP etc they are building their machines cheaper and cheaper.

One good thing in the MBP favour - it has a 6 pin firewire (allowing bus power for firewire interfaces) and great implementation of firewire, as opposed to the freaking terrible implementation and poor chipsets in many PC laptops. Plenty of great FW interfaces available for not too much dough.

Getting a MBP without a decent audio interface is like buying the bog standard version of a BMW. The one without the leather seats and high performance engine and electronics everywhere, the one with the basic engine, beige cloth seats version and no cup holders.