Ableton Forum

when i use my soft synths it bumps my cpu up to 40% and above (this is just 1 synth playing on its own) which then causes the sound to clip as soon as it passes 40%. im using the latest version of live and its running on a mac book os x 10.4.11. 2.16 G Hz core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram.
ive tried turning off all non essential apps etc but it hasn't helped at all.

has anybody got any ideas as to what the problem may be. the soft synths in question are massive and circle (although ive only got the demo of circle at the moment)

thanks.

driver issues maybe? whats the interface?

Airport off? If not, turn it off.

ew

Massive - turn ECO mode on until your final render, that should save you quite a bit of CPU. Definately Airport off is the consensus here (this goes for PC wifi as well as Mac actually).

This is why track freeze was invented. Many softsynths sound great but they chew CPU like a vulture chews on a dead rat. You can do things like turn down the number of voices (in some synths) / polyphony, this can be set to like 32 or 64 voices by default and that is just not necessary, put it down to 8 or even 4 voices. Also unison mode often causes these problems, if you have a lot of stacked unison sounds. For example it's possible to have 16 unison voices on the Arturia JP8V plugin but your CPU will be frying it's brain under that kind of strain in most cases. Cut down on the unison voices or multi track the synth with slightly different tunings/detunings instead for simlar effect.