Ableton Performance Issue - Too many EFX / EFX Chains or LFOs

Discussion in 'Live' started by iCe!, Jun 19, 2021.

  1. iCe!

    iCe! Ultrasonic

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    Hi,

    I'm an experimental music producer and I like to use very large and wicked efx device chains / racks. Sometimes i have up to 30 efx-devices on one channel+/-group going on. Some (or more) efx device parameter are controlled by a LFO devices. Sometime I have like 3 LFOs per device and parameter going on. Which, overall, sums up to a tons of LFO devices you know. + additional automatitions.

    All in all its a huge mess... but sounds are great. But Ableton is going crazy on CPU. The CPU have hard times IDLEing (with no playback at all), I guess because of all the LFOs and some of the efx devices.

    Often the playback sound is freezing / crashing, like, you can actually hear things goes off in bits and bytes. sometimes the ableton and the sound recovers but sometimes also stops completly with ableton freezes aswell.

    Now the problem is that i want to be able to access some of the efx device parameter all the time. So recording is not really an option. I've tryed it and, well, no.. no cool, blocks the creativity process. It takes way too much time.

    I wonder, is the LFO maybe too CPU hungry. Is there a LFO-device (m4L) which is faster/better then ableton lives standard LFO.

    What else could i do?
    Offload the efx to a second maschine?

    btw. i use almost only the standard efx devices which come with ableton live 11
    (I fall in love with those devices long ago, they are great)

    thanx in advance
    for any advice / help
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2021
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  3. nctechno

    nctechno Kapellmeister

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    as nobody answered you until now i still hope you see this: ableton uses only one cpu core per channel. you can group your effects to circumvent that, as the effect racks get their own threads assigned.
     
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  4. DontKnowJack

    DontKnowJack Producer

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    Could you elaborate a little? What do you mean by "group your effects"? I'm an Ableton newb and having the same issue. Thx.
     
  5. Demloc

    Demloc Platinum Record

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    DidnĀ“t knew that, superhepful.
    He means that if you press Ctrl+G or Command+G in an effect or group of effetcs, ableton assign a new separated CPU thread to that group, liberating the one already assigned to the channel.
     
  6. nctechno

    nctechno Kapellmeister

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  7. nctechno

    nctechno Kapellmeister

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  8. ArticStorm

    ArticStorm Moderator Staff Member

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    Which version of ableton are we talking about?
    Because Ableton's version behave very different in its cores performance-wise.
     
  9. DontKnowJack

    DontKnowJack Producer

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    Thanks for the explanation. I will give it a try.
    Where do I find more of this heavenly music? This is really good!
     
  10. AbsoluteMadLad

    AbsoluteMadLad Ultrasonic

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    are using 11.0.0 R2R release? if so, i strongly suggest updating to 11.0.11 release from R2R because there's something seriously wrong with the 11.0.0 release. it solved the CRAZY cpu usage problems for me. it's still slightly worse than 10, but it's at least usable now.. :wink:
     
  11. nctechno

    nctechno Kapellmeister

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