I installed it as soon as it came out and I haven't had any crashes (well, no more than usual xD). I use it every day for quite a few hours. But some people have experienced crashes with it.

There's also a bug with group bounce; if there's MIDI in it, it's not rendered quite as it should be. You have to freeze the MIDI tracks in the group beforehand to fix the problem. The difference is fairly slight, apparently a phase issue.

I didn't notice extra CPU Usage, maybe because my computer is relatively new and i use somes UAD plug-ins with a DSP Satellite.

 

Last edited: Nov 30, 2025

@ArticStorm thanks for sharing your experience. I am on 12.2.5 and will stay with it for the time being after reading your feedback (my machine is also long in the tooth).

IMHO, Ableton is bloating a really wonderful piece of sofware that is becoming harder and harder to use live (hope one day they look back and release an Ableton Live "live" version, less bloated, more ram and cpu-friendly and with improved stability for... errr... live usage).

 

They just want to sell, and the competition dictates what they do. "Oh, Studio has this or that now, we have to have it too to compete with the competition." Every DAW gets bloated and slower with every update. They should consider simply imposing an "UPDATE STOP"!

 

Updates and new features are a nice way to attract new users and even for the current user retention as well, Also to optimize the software for new hardware. Every software gets bloated with time, not just music production software other systems as well.

The solution most of the companies use is to refactor the affected areas of the codebase periodically maybe once a year/few years.That's how ancient software like cubase exist and works better than Ableton in terms of performance to this day.

The problem with Ableton it seems like the developers there don't like to mess with core of live that much or they don't have that much expertise to handle the codebase, which is highly unlikely for a company that scale. Live is meant to be a performance first software that's why they prioritize audio stream over anything else, Resulting in sluggish performance with larger projects with higher plugin/track counts. Even the new stem separation feature doesn't utilize external GPUs properly at least on windows, resulting in slower speeds.

And for ARA, I'm not sure if it'll be ever implemented since they're using plugin sandboxing which is crucial to prevent host from crashing when a plugin fails, Again a crucial requirement for live-performances. But most of us use it as a studio-first production software. Maybe one day there's a chance if Ableton decides to separate their software into 2 versions "Ableton Live" and "Ableton Studio".

 

check to tick/ untick the GPU render. the default (off) value was showing 20% of usage.
once added and disabled, the value take down.



without


as if the unselected option need to add a value somewhere to be active.

 

I also heard crashes on 12.3 so will stay on 12.2. Ableton is my DAW of choice and Im happy but I like to know how many new licenses and upgrades they sell every year compare to Steinberg.
Just because if I look back at all the features expended in Cubase compare to Live there should be something they are missing especially as it seems Live is one of the major DAWs mainstream if Im right.

For Live performance I like the Keep Latency option in the mixer in order to delete lantency on a Live Vocal Mic without the need of UAD realtime device,

 

Yeah Live is really slow these days. I went back to the last version of Live 10 and its so much better.