I’ve seen Ableton eat at least one Apple core.
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Many more cores than Atari… DIGITAL HARDCORE!!!
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Core-Core.
It’s the future.
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You may add Happy Hardcore to your list.
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What about sad core?
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And normcore
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I’d never get a Mac just based on specs (not even in the Apple Silicon era). Get a Mac if you’re already in the Apple ecosystem and want a tight seamless integration with your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Airpods etc. I switched to OSX from Windows roughly around the time the first iPhone came out (before Android was a thing) and it was the best decision for me but that’s a personal choice. It’s never about specs when comparing Mac to Windows and iOS to Android!
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There are other types of Mac users out there: I love the macOS operating system, but hate the idea of being in the “Apple ecosystem”. I’ve never had an iPhone or any of that other iStuff, but have used macOS for years. It’s been a fantastic OS since they changed it to be Unix-based. I’m a big Linux geek, but for music applications, I think macOS wins (at least in my opinion).
Operating system design apart, I think the Apple Silicon systems are really impressive when it comes to memory management and power efficiency. I wouldn’t be surprised if other computer manufacturers started moving to ARM-based SOC systems as well… it seems like the future, to me.
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I switched from MacBook Pro i5 to a M3 Pro, it´s unreal, what a machine. The other day i had the whole Adobe Suite open, rendering video, working in Photoshop and listening to a youtube video, not only was it snappy as before the load but even the Vents didn´t go on. I´m really impressed by the mac ARM, they did something very right. I haven´t come even close to any significant CPU load with Ableton Live.
Have you checked activity monitor rather than the internal meter? If you open a new live project and open AM, what does it show as live’s CPU use?
But it’s really all just Mathcore, isn’t it?
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I went in AM from 47% with nothing loaded in Ableton 12 to loading and playing a set with 68 tracks, and AM went to 110% for Ableton. So 68 tracks with lots of stuff (in addition to in-the-box instruments and FX, this includes multiple instances of VSTi’s including Pigments, Serum, Massive, and plenty of VST FX) on them used a little over 1 performance core worth. No fans came on, completely silent.
(12 core M2Max, 8 perf cores).
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Yes this is consistent with what Ableton has said about this issue on the Ableton forum. Fortunately @rgarner posted the issue there. I could paraphrase but better to just read the thread: Live 12 empty set eats 53% CPU/kills battery on M1Max at idle - Ableton Forum
It definitely seems to be aimed at supporting big projects with lots going on, but 50+% CPU use for a new/empty project is absurd.
This actually doesn’t bother me at all, because it works fine unplugged, even if the absurdly long battery life of my 16" M2Max macbook pro is lowered a little.
My slightly older Ableton rig, a 32Gb w SSD Dell G5 gaming laptop (with 6Gb Nvidia card) (4core, 8 hyperthread Intel i7), when on battery, would glitch and stutter and CPU spike and fail at doing Ableton when unplugged no matter how big the buffers on my MOTU were, because the cores kept cycling in and out of low power mode. (Audio is a lot easier than top-tier games, they never leave high-power mode)
Even changing to a high power profile when unplugged, which ate a lot of battery and gave me just a couple hours of time, audio would stutter just enough even on the still-required massive buffers for IO to my MOTU, unacceptable to be able to run a set in a venue. So, I ALWAYS had to run plugged in to perform or record because of Intel+Windows power management issues - and to get decent latency (back to a 512 sample buffer).
At least my 32Gb M2Max always delivers good audio at super low buffer sizes (depending on the set, 64 or 128 samples, same MOTU). And unplugged it not only works (unlike the Dell), but the battery also lasts way longer using part of 1 P core than the Dell did on the requisite high-power profile.
no complaints from me.
The thread on Ableton Forums has a reply someone received:
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Well you have a $3000+? laptop. That really shouldn’t be necessary. I have an m1pro 16gb (2tb) and the energy use and pops/dropouts were extremely noticeable. The options.txt fix brought my new project cpu use down to a much more reasonable 12%, but that’s still double Logic Pro.
Thanks for all the info in this thread. Just bought a base model Mac Mini M2 8/256 ($499 new w/educator discount!) that I think will be more than enough to run Ableton 10 with a decent amount of plugins.
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Live 10 came out way before the silicon processors were around, I’m not sure they even have updated it to native version, would be actually interesting to hear how it performs on an M mac… it was pretty good on my old intel MBP but with the whole rosetta thing (if it requires to run) it might be not that performant… but then again, it was leaner then the newer ones so it might be pretty good!
and $500 for an M2 mac mini is a damn good price!
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Well the real problem was the plugin updates, for instance just the new Pigments update alone made Ableton slow to a crawl on my current i5 Macbook Air. Typical planned obsolescence BS.
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hmmm, that’s an interesting point, I wonder if the newer plugins that have full silicon support running under a rosetta Live will take a performance punch or will they be running as native… either way, will be interesting to hear how older Live version will run on M, even if you try using stock only plugins.
it will sure perform better then i5 MBA guaranteed!
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Would certainly hope so 