Ableton Forum

yes, another one of these threads...
I'm terribly sorry.

macbook, 1 gb ram, library on an an external drive.

the track I'm working on is 12 channels deep, and ableton is clocking itself at an average of 45%.

I/O audio buffer time is at 20 ms with motu ultralite.

I know turning airport off will help improve sound quality, but even with it off, ableton is BRUTALIZING my computer. its freezing it solid, freezing randomly, cutting out randomly, not stopping for minutes at a time...

activity monitor clocked its activity at 125%.

NEVER had any of these problems on live 6.


is this normal?


EVERY action i do gives me the pinwheel of doom.

more RAM will open up Live 7 for you.

what version of macbook ie which processor are you running?

what plugins are you using?

Again and again...did you update the firmware version of Airport extreme to the newest? 2008-01, if so...it will cause you problems.

what atomikat said... and upgrade yer ram, for sure. Price isn't even an issue anymore, 2+gigs are really cheap these days.

the Airport firmware update thing would be great for a front page sticky.

seems to be causing mucho grief to the Mac massive.

Record all you clips AS AUDIO. Try not to run any real time plug ins or soft synths unless it is absolutely crucial to what you're trying to do

using all ableton instruments.

2 gigs are going in now.


will update!

Some of the Ableton instruments (like any vst/au), particularly if they are racked, can be very CPU intensive. Some FX can also be CPU intensive (esp. convolution reverbs or channel strips with a bunch of stuff turned on) and also some FX (again rverbs, but other FX too) can induce high latencies.

Get extra RAM and freeze some tracks or render to audio/flatten. Will make a big difference.

the added ram is working like a charm.


I would like to thank all of you and ice cream for being there for me in my time of need.

I've tolerated Ableton crashes in the past, since other DAW's I have used (Cubase, Reaper) have crashed usually just as much.
I was impressed this weekend when I worked on and completed a project without one crash. A lot of automation changes, use of external controllers, synths, racks, etc. No crashes. I was pleased.

i suppose this is true, we complain about stability, but for the most part, ableton is pretty solid, if you aren't maxing out. every program is going to crash. thats computers for you.

its also very difficult to loose your song in ableton, due to the fantastic auto recovery.

i remember loosing entire songs in FL studios, and giving up on music for a few weeks.

out of a gig of ram, running live 7, i had < 10 mb availible on my ram, when abelton was idle.

I also tend to run it in conjunction with firefox, and live messenger, which both also love their ram.

hopefully the new ram will hold ableton steady, but it seems to be doing great so far.

if it bugs up, you usually know why, or its a result of external vst's.