Comments on: Ableton Live + Logic 7.2.1 + ReWire + Intel Mac Hands-On: It Works, It Rocks, More Ableton Forum Speed Tests

By: Create Digital Music » MacBook Pro Speed Bump: Core 2 Duo, FireWire 800’s Triumphant Return

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:48:30 +0000

[...] Wait — scratch that last line. I think they said “seven.” But having tested the first MacBook Pro, suffice to say that the Pro was already a huge leap forward from the G4 machines. I have a 1.5G G4 PowerBook, and it routinely crumples under the load of serious music software. The MacBook Pro is more in the realm of my dual-AMD PC and dual-G5 Mac. (See previous benchmark coverage.) The MacBook Pro is a terrific machine for Logic Pro, of course, meaning you can now use CPU-hungry plug-ins like Sculpture and Space Designer on the road or onstage. And it’s looking better than ever for tools like Ableton Live, particularly with Live 6’s significant new dual-core optimizations. [...]

By: Ean

Ean — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:17:48 +0000

Its not a big surprise that it runs more efficiently under Windows. After all, OSX is essentially a BSD personality running on a Mach microkernel. The abstraction layer of the microkernel *will* impose a CPU speed cost.

By: Paul Davis

Paul Davis — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:39:42 +0000

FYI, i know that ardour has streamed close to 70 mono continuous audio tracks from a totally off-the-shelf ATA disk drive on both linux + OS X. since that version of ardour also always uses 32 bit float on disk, in theory there is room to squeeze another 30% increase without losing sample resolution.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:20:28 +0000

That sounds realistic . . . 20 tracks at a time is quite doable. The made variable, really, is hard disk I/O, assuming you’re running raw tracks. FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 drives work perfectly well.

My next drive will definitely be a Raptor; they’re great and very affordable.

By: thesimplicity

thesimplicity — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:37:31 +0000

Okay, let me elaborate a bit.

I did mean 100 tracks total in a piece, not 100 tracks constantly playing. Should have explained that better, sorry. I do have on average 20 or so tracks playing through the whole piece, but a lot of what adds up to the 100~ tracks is just doubling wind instruments for a few measures or so and dropping out. It still amazes me how well the entire project is handled, though, compared to the stutter I run into a lot with Live.

The computer itself is using a 36GB Raptor as the main working drive, which probably has a hand in it. It’s a Win98 machine with absolutely nothing else on it besides Audition 1.0 and the free version of ProTools. I use ProTools mainly for waveform editing and do most of the multitracking in Audition.

Raptor disks are really nice, by the way. I’m planning on picking up a few more when the larger sized ones become more affordable. I think the 150GB models are about $300 right now.

This kind of makes me want to waste the day to see how many tracks I can stream at once before my computer catches fire. :D

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:43:21 +0000

Paul, I’m itching to have Linux-like Jack functionality and be done with ReWire, absolutely! But I do need transport sync, so for now, this is about ReWire, at least on the Mac.

Not having to rely on ReWire would be a huge boon. I know that writing ReWire host apps in particular is tricky, or say say my developer friends. And plenty aren’t, like the just-released KORE from Native Instruments (KORE works as a plug-in and standalone only). So it’d be terrific for us to be able to have OS-level services that gave us not only inter-app audio and MIDI, but sync, too, a la Jack on Linux.

Richard, I’m guessing it’s Live’s tendency to try to stretch everything that may be your issue . . . I usually try to watch the amount of audio stretching that’s going on to improve performance. That is, of course, CPU-intensive (especially if high-quality or complex mode are on).

Oh yeah, I didn’t read that Audition post carefully; thanks, Paul. 100 tracks? Not sure what you mean, simplicity.

By: Paul Davis

Paul Davis — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:34:11 +0000

there was a claim above of 100 tracks played back using audition and protools. i’d be very very interested to know the disk i/o configuration and the track “audio density” - where these tracks with a little bit of audio spotted here and there on each track, or where they 100 tracks filled with audio from start to finish?

you cannot get the bandwidth from anything except the most recent disks to play 100 solid-audio tracks at once from a single spindle. the numbers just don’t add up. even on the newest disks, i don’t believe you could get 100 solid-audio tracks at once from a spindle in general.

if the tracks are sparse, that would explain the capacity, but it ends up not really measuring anything either. you can run 500 tracks or more if there is basically no audio occuring in most of them most of the time :)

By: Paul Davis

Paul Davis — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:26:14 +0000

Just as a reminder, you can do all this with JACK and not be limited to ReWire-enabled applications.
At least for audio. But you all remembered that already and were just itching for ReWire’s higher level of integration into the apps, right?

By: Lachlan

Lachlan — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:00:32 +0000

I wonder how much of an overhead OS X’s graphics put on the system overall … I wouldn’t imagine XP’s graphics would burden anything judging by how utilitarian they look … It would be interesting if you could strip OS X back to a bare bones kind of XP look then re-test …

By: richardl

richardl — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:12:43 +0000

Ok! That’s encouraging. I’ve been using Live 5. I’ll try using other software and shifting things around.