no joke
what are you using now. why do you think any other will be better?
your answer determines my response.

a step further, ratio of audio tracks to midi
external , internal gear
bussing and finaly send channels (what kind of routing)
general numbers work here ;)

Edit:
ok missed your second answer

os is the best on "pc" imo
how much tweaking , bios, os, gear specific (Au.Interface, Daw) did you do?

finaly
is it a question of realtime perfomance issues
for instance do you try play synths later in the mixing stage (what are the settings here)
or is you i7(wich one?) maxed out while mixing?
what are the settings here (can and should be much higher (than playing and recording settings)
do you use things like uad dsp or linearphase Eqs

lastly
how many processes are running (taskmanager should give you a number)
what does dpc latency (or Mon) say

 

Last edited: Apr 9, 2017

Yes, it is a realtime perfomance issue. I should have given this info of course...

 

So it's about your CPU, your DAW/Plugins optimization and your Soundcard driver and how (how well) it communicates with your CPU.

 

You are Right... It is a CPU matter, it is when CPU spikes that the skips and crackles start. I have the settings in Studio One 3 to use all 8 cores (tried with less also) but Studio One only use one core no matter what, it seems. (hate to leave studio one 3, but it cant handle the live playing CPU-wise.)So, with this info, what DAW's can do a better job here?

 

are you using only 1 channel to play live? or do you have lots of tracks with high cpu plugs? can u show us an OS cpu meter ?
actually every daw can handle as many cores as you have.
i assume you use only 1 channel and load all your stuff on it, that cannot work since daw's can use only 1 core per channel.
in that case you have to use return channels/busses to spread the load evenly,
can you be more precise about your machine? whats the exact CPU ? i7 alone doesn't tell the whole story.

 

it would really help your case if you answered all the questions i asked

it could be that you change the daw and run into the same problems again ;)

 

Last edited: Apr 10, 2017

i missed 1 post, now i see your problem:
first off you should just open the cpu monitor in windows task-manager, so you can see all cores/threads and how much they are used.
then experiment, group tracks together and send them to another one and process them there, use a return channel/bus for altiverb to dedicate 1 core to just this plugin. then there's always the option to use more cpu friendly plugins for real time performance.
you could also try to disable multithreading

you could get a new system, you need high single core performance
nothing beats an i7 7700k in terms of latency and single core performance, don't know whats your current i7, if its an 3770k its close to double the performance.

 

if you want to learn more about cpu real time performance in DAW's check this out:

 

Sonar, Reaper and Samplitude, will spread cpu use across all cores>>> so if you have a heavy load on the master or any other channel CPU use is still even>>> =uses all cores evenly>>> other DAW's do not implement this feature yet my man and will crap out on the core that is using the most power>>>= spiking on that core;) so if you want even CPU use across the board = more plugins, more synth's and get 50% more out of your DAW then those 3 DAW's are your best choice \m/ >>> REPEAT MYSELF>>> if you Load a shit load of plugins Fx synth on one channel Studio one will crap out on you because its only using one core for that channel>>> Sonar, Reaper, an Samplitude will use every core you have if it 4 cores or 20 cores to process that one channel = its a WIN WIN \m/ @ REAL TALK EDIT>>> ALSO as the above comment states use higher Buffers for mixing bigger projects will lower cpu use aswell, make sure most of your unused background services are disabled/not running and set PC to run in High performance mode \m/

 

Last edited: Apr 12, 2017

we use Ableton 9 Suite and Studio One 3 in the studio on an i7 - 7200hdd - 8gb ram, they both run fine with full sessions, plenty of tracks/auxes/buses/mix plugins/synths both internal and 3rd party @64 samples for both tracking and playback - no problem

 

As @Jaymz mentioned, its all about poor cpu handling in s1, it sucks since its a pretty cool daw.I have both cubase and s1 installed and can load 2x as much plugins and synths with my i7 in cubase comparing to s1 and cubase isnt even the best at multi cpu handling.

 

Yes i love Cubase 8.5 >>> its to me way above Studio one in terms of what you can throw at it and not crap out>>> as someone mentioned Earlier Reaper,Sonar,Samplitude,Cubase best DAW's for handling high demands for processing ;)

 

Thank you to all who answered! Some great answers there. I'll try the suggestions and see what I can find out.

 

I have a 64 bit hp 8gb i5 all in one 27" . I'm using the 32 bit version of Fl Studio and can run 3 instances of Kontakt (Albion 1, signal, morphestra) an instances of omnisphere and a couple nexus's and sylenths easily. Only 2 plugs that have ever given me problems are Diva and Lush.

 

I've seen some film scoring people using Ableton, but I have never seen Ableton handle 1000 tracks like Cubase can. This is a very good video about this subject. When you're dealing with 1000 tracks navigation becomes an epic adventure. A common DAW cannot handle something like this, even if it could manage to load 1000 tracks without melting, this is why Cubase has scripting.

 

FLS 12 x64 handles multithreading (all cores evenly) that way too, just to add one to your list.

 

I still haven't upgraded to the latest version. I notice one core bogging down with the version I'm using. I think I'm going to break down and do the deed this weekend. I was toying with the idea of trying Reaper for this purpose, but your post makes me wonder if there'd be any benefit to it other than the "freeze to this point" feature of Reaper. Really like the idea of being able to freeze a chain to the point I'm working on in order to finish gain staging the last few plugins in the chain with out having to disable all the bus plugins.

Where is this plugins buffer setting?

 

I`m a bit pushed for time,
how well goes the new Tracktion Waveform
i.e. compared to Reaper`s stability and performance with vsti`s on a pc ?

 

This thing about reaper performance over cubase is completely nonsense, i moved from cubase to reaper, tested for about a year for all kinds of music, and loved a lots of things, made thousands of configurations and scripts, but i was forced to go back to cubase just because one of them, performance.
Reaper can't handle projects like this from Juckie XL video, and the interface becomes pretty buggy after a while, it uses almost the same ram, but twice minimum the cpu of cubase. the solo buttons becomes pretty buggy, with audio clicks, and when you use automatic record enable in all channels also.

 

get an old computer and use VEP 5 0r 6 and use as a slave... you will fly because daws are heavy.