Ableton Forum

This is not an Ableton Slam. I am just sharing my experience to date. It may have been duplicated in a similar way if I chose another DAW to cut my teeth on. However, I went with Live 6LE.

I have an older laptop computor. It is a Compaq Presario R3000. Now its not a beast, but after spending $220 to upgrade the RAM I had a system that exceeded the recommended specifications for Live 6LE.
Ableton Quote:

Windows System Requirements-1.5GHz CPU or faster - 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)

I have a P4 3.2 GHz, with 1.37 GB RAM. Clearly more than is suggested. Yesterday I simply chose 5 clips from the library, put them into a scene in session view and hit the play button. My CPU monitor ran between 39% - 57% with the result that the audio crapped out. It wasn't until I reduced it to 3 clips that it stabalized.

I then proceeded to impliment as many of the XP tweaks as I could as taken from the MUSICXP.NET site to help the CPU along. Some of my regular daily use programs now seem to run a tad faster, but I noticed no difference in Live. I was careful to load the same clips in the same order for a fair comparison.

I am OK with computors, but I am not really that knowledgable or experienced with hotting them up. My dissapointment lies with taking the specifications recomended by Ableton at face value. This being my first DAW experience, I have been going at this blind. Lots of people here on the forum have been wonderful with helping me out with understand whats going on. I appreciate all of you. But today, I am just plain dissapointed.

I am not rolling in coin these days. With the price of computors here in New Zealand I simply can't go out and upgrade. I have to live with what I have got until fortune shines on me sometime down the road. The only thing I can think of now to do that is within my grasp is pay another $220 and max out the RAM to 2 GB. The second thing is to consider a Dual Boot system. It would be nice if some of you could maybe advise me if the dual boot could help with freeing up CPU resources. I know there are other factors that I should consider but, being still very inexperienced I am just following my nose, reading the forum and trying to read between the lines.

I can see why you all brag about Live and why you have so much fun with it. I just want a piece of it myself. G.

What audio interface and sample rates, latency settings etc are you using?

That can make or break live...

Which sound card are you using?

Heh - what he said. ^

gjm wrote:This is not an Ableton Slam. I am just sharing my experience to date. It may have been duplicated in a similar way if I chose another DAW to cut my teeth on. However, I went with Live 6LE.

I have an older laptop computor. It is a Compaq Presario R3000. Now its not a beast, but after spending $220 to upgrade the RAM I had a system that exceeded the recommended specifications for Live 6LE.
Ableton Quote:

Windows System Requirements-1.5GHz CPU or faster - 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)

I have a P4 3.2 GHz, with 1.37 GB RAM. Clearly more than is suggested. Yesterday I simply chose 5 clips from the library, put them into a scene in session view and hit the play button. My CPU monitor ran between 39% - 57% with the result that the audio crapped out. It wasn't until I reduced it to 3 clips that it stabalized.

I know it's not listed in the system requirements, but I would bet that one real bottleneck on that laptop is the disk drive. Some quick googling suggests that it's probably 4200rpm, which is slow for audio apps. The manual has some suggestions for dealing with this.

Now, on the other hand, I started using live 5 on a G3 ibook that was less than a third of the speed of your machine in mhz (probably even slower in practice), had half the ram, and had a 4200rpm disk drive, and with judicious freezing and creativity, I managed to do all sorts of things. So something is clearly not right about only being able to play 3 clips, even if performance in L6 did get a bit worse. (In fact, this was one of the things that sold me on live, that the demo ran usably on that machine...*cough cough* you did try the demo, right?)

Khazul wrote:What audio interface and sample rates, latency settings etc are you using?

That can make or break live...

My sound card/Audio I/O device is an M-Audio Fast Track USB. The Buffer size is set to 384, and latency in and out at 11.1ms. I went through the tutorial in the initial set up and ended up with these values. I have no reference point yet to make logical changes. G.

(crank your audio buffer to the MAX when you're not doing liveish stuff)

tylenol wrote:

I know it's not listed in the system requirements, but I would bet that one real bottleneck on that laptop is the disk drive. Some quick googling suggests that it's probably 4200rpm, which is slow for audio apps. The manual has some suggestions for dealing with this.

I considered this early on and picked up an external drive (OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro with Oxford 911 Chipset, 7200rpm) and am using it via the FW400 which is a TI one. Neb's yesterday, for another reason suggested using it via USB instead. I have not tried this yet. I did not think it would make a difference on the CPU perfermance.

you did try the demo, right?)

No

b0unce wrote:(crank your audio buffer to the MAX when you're not doing liveish stuff)

Sorry b0unce, I am not quite sure what you mean. Is the MAX the biggest value or the smallest? And what would this be likley to affect in a positive way when using Live. Thanks. G.

gjm wrote:

b0unce wrote:(crank your audio buffer to the MAX when you're not doing liveish stuff)

Sorry b0unce, I am not quite sure what you mean. Is the MAX the biggest value or the smallest? And what would this be likley to affect in a positive way when using Live. Thanks. G.

MAX is the biggest, crank it right UP.

it gives you greater CPU overhead, but it costs you latency.

put it low when you are entering note data, like playing a beat on some drum pads or a melody on your keyboard, any kind of data-entry where timing/monitoring is important...

when that's done, crank it up again.

think of your audio buffer like gears on a bike, on any single journey you may need to change the gears a few times depending on what hills and valleys you come across.

sample rate highest you can set it, this will hive you more cpu head room

like 1024 o 2048 what ever the highest you can go

the draw back is more latency.

b0unce wrote:

gjm wrote:

b0unce wrote:(crank your audio buffer to the MAX when you're not doing liveish stuff)

Sorry b0unce, I am not quite sure what you mean. Is the MAX the biggest value or the smallest? And what would this be likley to affect in a positive way when using Live. Thanks. G.

MAX is the biggest, crank it right UP.

it gives you greater CPU overhead, but it costs you latency.

put it low when you are entering note data, like playing a beat on some drum pads or a melody on your keyboard, any kind of data-entry where timing/monitoring is important...

when that's done, crank it up again.

think of your audio buffer like gears on a bike, on any single journey you may need to change the gears a few times depending on what hills and valleys you come across.

Thankyou. Makes total sense.

If you're getting a CPU hit - it's more about the CPU than the RAM, isn't it?

Those clips from the library could contain loooong fx chains, racks or whatever. I could get my Core 2 Duo 2.0 ghz to crackle out too with a complex chain. No probs.

You need to look into what your computer is actually doing to get that CPU hit.
Of course more ram is always good, but as long as you don't run anything in parallell to Live, 1.37 gig (strange number) should be sufficient.

I know it doesn't make sense, but I have a 3 year old Powerbook and would occasionally have similar problems. I went from Live 5 to 7 and suddenly I am running GOBS of stuff and my computer doesn't break a sweat. There were no other variables in my system (except maybe using 2 stereo inputs instead of 3). All I can figure is Live 7 likes my olde' computer .

good Luck.

Also, except for PSP Warmer, I am running only Live devices.

Lo-Fi Massahkah wrote:If you're getting a CPU hit - it's more about the CPU than the RAM, isn't it?

Those clips from the library could contain loooong fx chains, racks or whatever. I could get my Core 2 Duo 2.0 ghz to crackle out too with a complex chain. No probs.

You need to look into what your computer is actually doing to get that CPU hit.
Of course more ram is always good, but as long as you don't run anything in parallell to Live, 1.37 gig (strange number) should be sufficient.

I did wonder what may be behind some of the clips I chose. For instance If I use the Clips>Mallets>Bell Forge Riff2.alc clip all by itself the CPU monitor hoovers between 2%-3% when not playing and 14%-18% when playing this one clip alone. Is that not a big CPU hit by any standards?

I actually have 1.5 GB Ram loaded, I am thinking that the Video shares some of the RAM hence the 1.37 listed in the systems properties tab.

In terms of running something in parallel to Live, you simply mean that I am not taking up system resources by having other programs running right? I guess that is why I was thinking about maybe dual boot. To be honest I have not done a system refresesh since new, probably now 3 years. It occured to me that I could start from scratch, dump all the crap collected over the years and refine things better for using with a DAW. But only having 1 more unlock left I thought about Dual Boot anyway.