Ableton Live 12 Trial extremely slow on powerful Macbook

[mark-w]

Hi all,

I recently installed the Live 12 Trial to see if Ableton is something I might want to use. So far, my experience has been quite terrible. Not because I don't like what the software can do, but rather because it's just functioning terribly slowly on my computer. I'm watching YouTube tutorials and I see people having very smooth interfaces. Meanwhile, anytime I would do anything as simple as clicking the little pencil or keyboard icons (or use the shortcuts), it's all just very unresponsive.

Takes maybe about a second or two to register--at least. Oftentimes it feels like it hasn't registered at all, so I click again and then it performs the function twice (ie, I end up where I was) after a little while. Same with the play/stop buttons. Also, whenever I'm looping my sounds, the progress bar will be very laggy--generally just plain unusable. It will just get stuck in one place and then just kind of hop around all over the place. I checked the activity monitor and even if I don't do anything, cpu will be over 50%--is that normal?

Now, as for my computer, I'm using a Macbook Pro with an M2 Pro, 32GB of ram. There is no way these specs shouldn't be able to handle turning on/off some simple button or rendering a progress bar--absolutely no way. The thing cost me 3 grand not too long ago. I didn't mess around with any settings, I didn't create any huge projects. All I did was install and try to follow some simple tutorials, but the performance is just very bad and unsustainable if I were to use it seriously in the long term.

Only thing I thought of later is that I've got an external drive (Time Capsule) on my network. No clue why that would slow anything down, but in any case, I will try to disconnect the location and see if that improves anything. I did read somewhere about Ableton indexing some files but, again, no clue if that's related...

Am I missing something? Am I going crazy? Would really appreciate it if people could advise here. Just want to create some sweet beats.

edit: also, I was wondering, is there any way I can download a v11 Trial, see if that makes any difference?

[jpallatin]

Have you completely discarded a malfunctioning of your system being the culprit? No matter if it's new and expensive like yours. Live 12 works amazing here (since pre-release betas), in a less powerful than yours M1 Pro MacBook Pro running latest version of MacOS Sonoma. There's no reason it should be any different in your case. Something is wrong with the system IMO. However, contact Ableton support, maybe they'll be able to assist you.

[mark-w]

Hi, if someone were to tell me it's some setting on my computer that needs changing, I'd be happy to hear about it. In any case, it shouldn't be the hardware because--as you're saying--Live should be running just fine even on slower hardware than I'm using. I have also done a little monitoring, but it's not my cpu is throttling or anything--not even the fans are spinning up for this kind of basic stuff. Got more than enough storage as well, ram all good too, no strange network activities. All just seems very normal, and yet Live is super laggy.

Anyway, in the meantime, I've done some digging myself as well and I found some reddit comment somewhere about messing with the Macbook's power saving settings. Now, I've generally got mine plugged in and so I'm not using power saving mode (limiting the hardware performance). However, I played around with it and for some very strange reason, when I set my computer to only ever use power saving mode, Ableton runs a lot better. Still not butter smooth, but at least I can now see that the metronome button is supposed to be blinking--something I never even knew because it was so laggy it just didn't even do it.

It's alright for now--not like I need all the theoretical extra performance of my cpu anyway, but of course I shouldn't have to limit the power of my computer to make Ableton run better. And it really is only Ableton having this odd issue. I run all kinds of programs; virtual machines, Affinity, Office, game emulators, Spotify... All run just as one would expect. This is why I'm hesitant ascribing it to the computer as well. Again, it might perhaps be some odd thing I'm missing, but I tend to not mess very much with my computer's default settings so I cannot really think of anything that would explain such behavior.

I would also like to try Live 11, see if the same problems persist. For the kinds of basic things I'm doing, that'd probably just as fine as 12 and it would be interesting to see if it would resolve anything. Does Ableton still offer download links for 11 anywhere?

[cids]

Ableton Live 12 runs perfectly fine on my 2 Mac M1/M2 systems so it must be something specific - are you sure you're not running Live under Rosetta?

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... a-on-macOS

In general it is best to have a low buffer size (128 samples) on these Apple Silicon Macs - please also check for any background processes that might take CPU time

[SQLmusic]

Hey,

I just upgraded to live 12 and performance has been really bad.
Just loading a plugin to the chain causes a beachball to show up.
Im running Monterey on an M1Pro so should be plenty for ableton.
Could the problem be OS related? Better performance on Sonoma?
Anyone else have this problem?

[[jur]]

[merged topics as they're pretty similar]

[scheffkoch]

@sqlmusic: i have the exact same setup like you (m1 pro with monterey) and the performance is absolutely awesome...have you set the buffer size to 128 samples?...

[SQLmusic]

Yep tried that, cleaned up my places too to avoid it was indexing many folders but no luck so far. Which os u running? Im about to see if upgrading to sonoma helps, but afraid of compatability issues with uad

[[jur]]

Yep tried that, cleaned up my places too to avoid it was indexing many folders but no luck so far. Which os u running? Im about to see if upgrading to sonoma helps, but afraid of compatability issues with uad

Upgrading the OS seems like a very brutal way of trying to solve this.
Did you try deleting Live's Preferences.cfg (well, move it to a safe place in case you need to put it back)? Have you check this article?

It's very unlikely but also check that Live isn't in Rosetta mode (cmd+i the application icon in the Finder and check here)

[mark-w]

Friends, I have miraculously managed to resolve my troubles. After lots of research and experimenting I found out that the issues I was experiencing did not occur when using only my MacBook’s display. This lead me to turn to messing with my display settings a bit; if others weren’t having such issues, they may be using different settings? Furthermore, when recording my screen (using Quick Time), Ableton was inexplicably running just fine… I could just run the screen recorder all day and over time ruin my ssd and have to bother with deleting enormous files all the time, but this was no realistic option. Though, what it did reveal to me was that whatever the issue was, it would have to be something that would be affected by running the screen recorder…

For my Mac, I use a utility called Better Display to make the scaling work ok on my 27” 1440p display. In there, I turned to the settings that I thought might have some impact on recording. One of these was the Hertz rate of the external display. At the time, I had it set to 75 Hz, which my monitor should support. However, when I set lowered it to 60 Hz (probably also the frame rate at which screen recorder runs?), Live was suddenly running fine.

So, is this a hardware or an Ableton problem? In a way, my issue still hasn’t been fully resolved; what if I’d like to use refresh rates higher than 60 Hz? The hardware should be capable, my Mac should support it just fine (as it does when running any other program), but Ableton becomes unusable. I am ok with accepting this compromise for now. I’m not a gamer and probably won’t even notice the difference. Nevertheless, I’d advise Ableton to look into this issue and see if it can be replicated and then resolved. I can hardly be alone in using an external display with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz. I do suspect this to be an Ableton issue at the core of it. I have also found people experiencing similar issues, even when using an official Apple external display and without using any display settings app (as for myself, I am not sure the app used even makes any difference; might as well set the Hz setting in the Mac Settings). Likewise, I have found people having similar experiences with 144 Hz displays which are increasingly common.

Anyway, for me this is manageable now, and I hope this forum post makes a difference for others experiencing the same thing. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to run the program using a higher refresh rate as well, but that is not something I can fix myself.

edit: unfortunately, I have been experiencing the same issues again yesterday. I ended up doing a screen recording again and it was smooth as butter, but this is no sustainable way to work. I just want to make some beats on an external display--very frustrating...

[SQLmusic]

Ok so i deleted the pref file and now only selected VST3 and AU3 plugins, that seems to have fixed the performance issue.
Probably there are some vst2 plugins that are massively slowing down live

[timday]

I'm getting the same thing. I haver a v large Live set (that contains all my tracks - I delete the ones I don't want when I play a show). it runs super smooth in 11 on my new Mac Studio (M2) and my MacBook Pro (M1) but 12 is visually glitchy and gets the dreaded beachball whenever I want to do simple things like drag track width a bit wider! Seems fine on smaller sets.