Audio Performance Questions Answered

Gerhard · Post by **Gerhard** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 6:33 pm

Dear users,

unfortunately, Live 3 will not bring a significant audio performance gain. By audio performance, we mean the number of tracks / effects you can run simultaneously without maxing out the CPU.

As was said before, a significant improvement of the audio performance requires a major redesign of the audio engine's architecture. This redesign is a prerequisite for platform specific optimizations like Altivec and SSE and, in fact, is a lot more work than the actual Altivec / SSE tweaks.

With a heavy heart we decided not to embark on the audio engine redesign for Live 3, for one reason: you would not have seen a Live 3 upgrade this year. We instead decided for a timely Live 3 that opens up exciting new creative possibilities. I hope that, once you see Live 3 in action, you will agree this was the right decision.

As so many Live users say an audio performance boost is the most urgent improvement they want to see, we now do what we never do: we commit to address this issue with the next major release.

As we have learned not to raise expectations we might not live up to, here is a big DISCLAIMER: we do not know at this point how big a gain we can achieve. We will not be able to improve the performance of VST plug ins. The performance gain is likely to vary per Live Effect. We do not know when the next major release will happen.

We are hoping this commitment will, in spite of the disclaimer, secure your belief and support for ableton.

Have a lot of fun with Live 3-- real soon!

Gerhard / ableton

pharmakonMtl · Post by **pharmakonMtl** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 7:00 pm

wow!

thank you for the explanation and the frankness of your message.

here's to the future (and present) of Live!

cheers!

-karmaphon

scotty · Post by **scotty** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 7:14 pm

Thanks for addressing our concerns and making this statement. One thing though, since it will be the next major upgrade, I gather that means that we will have to pay for yet another version?

thanks,
scotty

Per Boysen · Post by **Per Boysen** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 8:16 pm

Thank you for the straight forward information, Gerhard. For my personal use of Live the available CPU on a P3 700 MHz is fully sufficient. I want to use it live for live looping my tenor saxophone on stage and don't use that many tracks for this.

I sure miss the ability to overdub into a clip with a feedback setting though, as you do with delays, but I'm hoping to make up for this shortcoming with some VST plug-ins. After all live looping was never the major idea with Ableton Live.

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 8:17 pm

Thank you.

-Alex

atom_b · Post by **atom_b** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 8:59 pm

scotty wrote:I gather that means that we will have to pay for yet another version?

You always will have to pay for major improvements, since they require major development work.

Quality is a good thing to wish for, even better is the quality of thinking at ableton. Thanks!

I'm looking forward to this redesign, not as much in terms of performance, but improvement of sound quality. However, I'll for sure be very happy on my way in the meantime with the wonderful brain you put in 3.0. Great work.

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 10:46 pm

Hm - Okay... I should have the money for G4 by the time you update Live

This is all we wanted you to say all along, really. Thank you.

-Paws

edit - oh yeah - when's no 3 coming?

jamm · Post by **jamm** » Wed Sep 03, 2003 11:09 pm

Communication=nice

Greetinz Jamm

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Sep 04, 2003 9:57 am

Yep, thanks Gerhard.

Muchos respectos amigos!

It's probably wise to leave it till the next major revision - from a Mac standpoint anyway - during dev time there'll be new G5 laptops to take into consideration too.

stew · Post by **stew** » Thu Sep 04, 2003 10:33 am

Saving my pennies. I skipped the 2.0 update as it didn't offer me too much, but it looks like 3.0 will have some nice features!

m-laboratories.net · Post by **m-laboratories.net** » Thu Sep 04, 2003 4:41 pm

Ableton live 2.0.3 works perfectly on my PC - a 1.7ghz P4 with 768mb RAM running XP, and so I have no real gripes with performance.

Their promise shows that they're not only listening to (y)our complaints, but are even putting them ahead of other considerations. Surely they didn't expect or want to entirely rework the audio engine only 2 years after the initial release. Surely implementing VSTi support, or adding other midi capabilities would be of more financial benefit, too. Everyone out there with performance issues, take this to heart.

That said, I am so sick of hearing Mac users complain about performance issues and now I am so glad that I now have a legitimate reason to tell them to shut up.

Long live live.

ste · Post by **ste** » Thu Sep 04, 2003 6:34 pm

much respect to the people who developed "live" and thanx to bring out an easy to use catalysator for some mad ideas going to sound....

OUR BIGGEST FAILURE WILL BE TO FOLLOW THE BIG COMPUTER-COMPANIES PRICE POLITICS AND WASTE MUCH MONEY BY BYING EVERY YEAR NEW TECHNICS AND GET SLAVED AND CRUSHED BY THEM

madlab · Post by **madlab** » Fri Sep 05, 2003 6:50 am

At last, I'm glad to read words by Ableton people about this. Well, the sooner the better !!
However, now i feel like shit : I'm about to buy a laptop within 10-15 days, to work with Live and DP, the two softwares I bought to work. DP means I can't turn to PC. So I guess I won't be able to use Live safely in Live situation.

Please, Titanium owners, do you (and how) use Live live ??

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Fri Sep 05, 2003 7:12 am

Been using LIVE on aTiBook live on stage for about a year. Getting up to 15 tracks and a handfull of plugins. All good so far. Using a very slim Extensions Set for playing live. (Once I forgot to change from my video set before a gig and quietly freaked out as my desktop went to solid blue and the UI slowed....right...down.... but audio kept on keepin on.) Despite all the doom and gloom from Mac users, LIVE is a TOTALLY viable proposition on the Mac for me under OS9 - Haven't explored OSX for audio yet.

Specs:

TiBook 500
OS9.2.2
512Mb
4200rpm 40Gb IBM Travelstar internal HD
LIVE 2.03
RME Hammerfall DSP+Multiface

cheers
Paddy

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Sep 05, 2003 9:20 am

Thanks for the comments Ableton...
The sooner the better I say.
Optimizing is still the #1 problem/need for me.
(I feel this only with LIVE in OSX! Period. Please don't bash me.)
Crazy too is when I have 8 tracks with 4 FXs and the cpu peaks out
or the TEMPO will slow down under the strain...
Not cool.
Tom

PowerMac 733, SCSI Disc Raid, 1.2 gigs ram, OS X 10.2.6