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I have a pretty bad problem right now with music. I've gotten to the point with my edm productions where I am finishing more songs and making larger productions etc.. It never used to be a problem just working on sound design, drums, little clips and stuff. But now it seems that I cannot really continue on a lot of my ableton projects. They reach like 50-60 percent cpu and then it just becomes a nightmare to continue on it. This prettty much ruins my hopes of finishing any ssongs.

I have a 13inch macbook. ITs got a 2.4 ghz processor intel core i5 and 4 gb of ram.

What can I do? Can I upgrade the ram? Would a clean reboot help at all? I already practice freezing tracks and bouncing things down to conserve on cpu but its still not enough. How have some of you guys who make full-blown productions managed to do it? What type of computer do you use?

plz help

are you using an audio interface? Im surprised that your cpu is spiking as you are using the latest processor.
Make sure you run permissions often and just general maintenance for your mac(cleanup internet cache,daily scripts etc)
I recommend downloading onyx for this.
open up activity monitor and make sure that live is the only app running.
I dont believe that more ram would make a difference but i could be wrong.
Ive heard that ableton is not as efficient on high track counts as logic.

neonmansion wrote:I have a pretty bad problem right now with music. I've gotten to the point with my edm productions where I am finishing more songs and making larger productions etc.. It never used to be a problem just working on sound design, drums, little clips and stuff. But now it seems that I cannot really continue on a lot of my ableton projects. They reach like 50-60 percent cpu and then it just becomes a nightmare to continue on it. This prettty much ruins my hopes of finishing any ssongs.

I have a 13inch macbook. ITs got a 2.4 ghz processor intel core i5 and 4 gb of ram.

What can I do? Can I upgrade the ram? Would a clean reboot help at all? I already practice freezing tracks and bouncing things down to conserve on cpu but its still not enough. How have some of you guys who make full-blown productions managed to do it? What type of computer do you use?

plz help

wait for ableton 9, it will run better hopefully

go to prefrences > audio > output buffer size - increase it to reduce cpu. on the other hand, that will create delays when you are pressing a key (not recommended if you have midi controller)

i guess i'm never going to finish any songs. because none of that works. my computer just seems to not handle that many tracks.

Don't know what the problem could be as i don't use Macs a lot. Surely your cpu usage should go down if you freeze tracks? TBH i don't think Ableton is the most efficient DAW, things seem to lag a bit in big projects. Like others have said, make sure you're not running any other background programmes, updates, turn your wifi off, disable virus scans etc. Try to make sure that 100% of your CPU time goes towards making music.

What plugins are you using? Perhaps one of them is taking up a lot of CPU? If you have unison set high then one synth can bring a modern computer to a standstill. And some plugins have internal oversampling modes which can eat a lot of CPU.

neonmansion wrote:What type of computer do you use?

A PC.

some unconventional things:
turn off your wifi airport
keep your screen as dim as possible
cmd+option+escape to go to task manager and shut down apps you aren't using
for plugins, automate the on/off for when they're in use... don't just leave massive on when the midi clip isn't active. also, shut off all unused fx and other modules from your plugins if they're not in use
native effects can be run in economy mode, keep em that way until you wanna bounce the individual channel or until the mixdown
use return tracks for effects that can be shared like reverb/delay

fv2k wrote:keep your screen as dim as possible

Lol why did you say this? Dimming the screen just reduces power consumption, nothing to do with CPU.

i did say unconventional

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > High performance

jk whoops, mac book.

All wrong.

Only time this ever happend to me is when I didn't use auxiliaries. So every sound had it's own effect chain on it, instead of sharing
reverbs etc..
That, or there's way too much shit running on your system.

And if none of that is the case. You messed up your computer somehow.

Freeze tracks or bounce the tracks that are using a lot of plug ins. Always works for me. If you've already been doing this then I don't know what else to tell you

Deactivate MIDI clips that are not in use (even if the channel and its plugins are turned off.)

Delete silent sections of audio files.