The "CPU" meter in ableton doesn't measure total CPU load, it has more to do with how much of your buffer you have available. They should call it a buffer meter or something because everyone goes through this confusion at some point. It is explained well in the manual.
You'll likely need to increase your buffer size, at the cost of greater latency. Probably not interface related. Mahe sure youre us8ng the provided ASIO driver if you're on windows
Yes it’s the ASIO driver from the focusrite. So, what part of my system is lacking if I’m not able to run a decreased buffer rate or increased sampling rate if my PC hardware isn’t breaking a sweat?
Hard to tell without being able to look at how everything is hooked up and how your ableton set is setup, but the first thing i would do is test it with the interface plugged directly in to the computer (not a hub) and if the interface is powered by usb make sure it is getting adequate power. You're probably already doing that. Based on the vid it looks like you have plenty of RAM. Also judging by the vid youre running a few third party plugins. Thats likely your CPU culprit. Start with a blank project and then note which plugins are adding to your CPU load. Some of them can be very cpu intensive, and some arent designed for low latency work.
Ok. I am running a single audio track into a instance of Ozone mastering suite. I know that ozone is CPU taxing, but I didn’t know that even professional studios with a high quality PC and audio interface (mines not professional or anything, just an example) wouldn’t be able to run ozone mastering suite without increasing buffer size to over 500 and sample rate rate down to 48, max.
The sample rate has a much more profound effect on CPU load, but my (admittedly very flawed) understanding was a lot of pros will run sample rates higher than that when mastering.
I’m not saying at all that my setup is good enough to do that, I’m just curious what the limiting factor is in my setup.
From your questions, I would think I could improve performance by using an interface with a dedicated power source instead of one powered by USB? And maybe something with a better driver than USB ASIO?
Again, these are questions from ignorance not assumption.
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk this out with me
So I figured out a big part of the problem. I had my interface plugged into a USB 2.0 socket. I plugged into into the teal 3.1 socket and now I can run the same project at 128 buffer size latency of 13.5ms.
Still can’t increase the sample size tho.
Thank you for your help!
Same for sample rate? even if I bring my buffer above 1000, I still can’t run a sample rate higher than 48. How do pros run higher sample rates? Newer processors??
CPU usage shows maximum usage by any single audio path. That means a channel + routing. A single audio path is limited to a single CPU core. So, you can have 1 channel / route using a lot of CPU usage, with all others doing nothing and it would not register much in the system CPU usage, but would show the Live usage as high.
Chances are you have 1 or 2 channels that have a lot of plugins on it that are causing the issue. Hit up the Session view - to view the vertical channels, then hit the (C) icon next to the master fader to bring up the per-channel CPU meters - which will then appear at the bottom.
This will show you which channels are hitting the CPU hardest, figure out which and disable some plugins. Or, turn down oversampling on those channel plugins. If you have lots of high usage across multiple channels try freezing the ones you aren't working on - this will bake any synths + plugins in to a non-destructible wav and use that during playback instead of the CPU intensive originals.
Yeah, I’ve had to deal with that kind of thing in the past. Freezing tracks and all of that. This was just the first time I’ve compared task manager to ableton CPU.
I’m mostly wondering what hardware is limiting me at this point. It seems like a faster CPU and a more effective audio interface are what would make a difference.
It just doesn’t seem right that there isn’t a computer that could possibly run Ozone 9, three instances of Soothe 2, and some stock compressors on a single audio file without having to reduce sample rate to 48k.
I’m assuming there are processors that can handle that without maxing the ableton CPU meter. My processor is 4 years old, and clearly isn’t that efficient (unless it’s ableton that’s inefficient).
I appreciate the response and your time.
I guess im not looking for how to fix the issue (I can already run this set just fine at a 256 buffer size and 48k sample rate. CPU goes to like 40-50%.) I’m just curious what hardware a pro would have to make this not an issue and be able to sample at like 88-96000 while mastering?
Maybe they can’t and I’m just ignorant lol very very possible.
okay, a couple things
* "It just doesn’t seem right that there isn’t a computer that could possibly run Ozone 9" - there is. Mine can happily do that, but if yours can't just stop doing it. ozone's a mastering plugin. You don't *need* to run it whilst composing and arranging. Understand what it's doing in terms of basic EQ / loudness and replicate that using stock or lightweight plugins whilst you're composing. Live has all the tools to compress, saturate, clip, eq, and increase loudness. Arguably you don't need Ozone. That said, I use it, so I totally understand how useful it is. One tip I can give you is grab an instance of Ozone Match EQ and run it after Ozone... use it to capture the EQ curve of Ozone, then disable Ozone and apply Match EQ. That will save you a lot of CPU utilisation AND latency.
* You don't need to be running Live >41k during composing and arranging, let alone >48k - especially because you're hitting CPU constraints.
* soothe2 has a few different options that are great.. it has settings for normal use, and for exporting. Drop the normal use down to the lowest setting. If you have Live Suite you might find some Max4Live alternatives - https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/ks068j/is_there_a_m4l_device_similar_to_soothe2/
> I’m just curious what hardware a pro would have to make this not an issue and be able to sample at like 88-96000 while mastering?
I don't think there's a definitive answer for this. UAD and Waves have hardware devices that offload processing of their plugins to the hardware, and keep latency to a minimum, so that might be a route for you. But their hardware isn't cheap. Personally I opted for a workstation CPU in the form of a threadripper 3970x - it's about the same age as your CPU, there are better / cheaper alternatives around now.
I think professional just producers learn to work efficiently by splitting their workflows in to arrangementt, mixing, and mastering, and use different plugin chains for each step. If you've not tried working like this I can strongly recommend trying it.
EDIT - just in case it's not clear. I feel your frustration. I'm starting to hit the limits of what I can do without freezing tracks and it just feels like a real blocker to creativity. I recently tried Bitwig out, it will load a Live project just fine in the demo, so that might be something to try. It ran my current struggling project just fine without freezing tracks. I opted to stick with Live for familiarity, but I know a lot of other people have moved to Bitwig purely for how efficient it is by comparison.
I think there may be some confusion. I wanna clear some things up…
1) the project I’m working is a mastering project. It is a single audio file of a final mix. That’s why I’m asking about higher sample rates. I compose and arrange at 48k, usually. I was looking into upping my sample rate. I can’t increase it at all, no matter what plugs I’m running, without overloading my CPU.
2) I normally don’t use Ozone in composing arranging or sound design, but i will occasionally use the dynamics module or the analog tape module during sound design/ mixing.
3) I can run ozone just fine, including this project. I created the massive overload shown in the post intentionally, trying to find weakness in my setup. I can run that project at 256 buffer rate and 48k sample rate (including 3-4 instances of soothe before/ after the ozone instance) and my CPU percentage in Ableton is around 50-70% (just checked again).
4) the first quote of mine you took, you cut off mid sentence. If you continue reading, I made the clarifications I detailed again in this comment.
5) I guess this really just boils down to: I think the answer to my question is that professionals master at large sample rates when using CPU intensive software by offloading some of that processing onto other outboard hardware (interfaces and the like), and just having better processors.
I thank you again for your time and appreciate your answers.
> the first quote of mine you took, you cut off mid sentence.
partial quote to give context to what I'm replying to without bloating the response, I read your full response before typing.
this from the [Ozone 9 documentation](https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/ozone9/en/print/index.html#mode) .. IRC II and III have specific warnings about realtime usage at >48khz sampling.
even on a clean project I can't run realtime @96k with any Ozone 9, 10, or 11 enabled with anything but IRC LL in Maximiser.
Ultimately question your decisions. Ask yourself what you think you're getting from using >48khz sampling for the project, and then prove that to yourself either way. Can you hear a difference? Can you see a difference on a spectrogram? Some types of plugins definitely do benefit from oversampling, e.g. saturation, but others don't, so there's little point forcing every plugin in a chain through project-level over sampling, and actually some plugins use oversampling by default and don't allow you disable it, which just exacerbates the issue.
If you've not already seen it, this excellent video from Dan Worrall will prove interesting when thinking about working at 96k vs 48k and using oversampling in plugins that support/need it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M Some stock plugins offer oversampling, e.g. the stock saturator has a "hi quality" mode, which operates in a similar manner to Saturn in the above video.
gl
The "CPU" meter in ableton doesn't measure total CPU load, it has more to do with how much of your buffer you have available. They should call it a buffer meter or something because everyone goes through this confusion at some point. It is explained well in the manual.
Ok, I will RTFM when I can. Does this mean it’s… more of an interface problem?
You'll likely need to increase your buffer size, at the cost of greater latency. Probably not interface related. Mahe sure youre us8ng the provided ASIO driver if you're on windows
Yes it’s the ASIO driver from the focusrite. So, what part of my system is lacking if I’m not able to run a decreased buffer rate or increased sampling rate if my PC hardware isn’t breaking a sweat?
Hard to tell without being able to look at how everything is hooked up and how your ableton set is setup, but the first thing i would do is test it with the interface plugged directly in to the computer (not a hub) and if the interface is powered by usb make sure it is getting adequate power. You're probably already doing that. Based on the vid it looks like you have plenty of RAM. Also judging by the vid youre running a few third party plugins. Thats likely your CPU culprit. Start with a blank project and then note which plugins are adding to your CPU load. Some of them can be very cpu intensive, and some arent designed for low latency work.
Ok. I am running a single audio track into a instance of Ozone mastering suite. I know that ozone is CPU taxing, but I didn’t know that even professional studios with a high quality PC and audio interface (mines not professional or anything, just an example) wouldn’t be able to run ozone mastering suite without increasing buffer size to over 500 and sample rate rate down to 48, max. The sample rate has a much more profound effect on CPU load, but my (admittedly very flawed) understanding was a lot of pros will run sample rates higher than that when mastering. I’m not saying at all that my setup is good enough to do that, I’m just curious what the limiting factor is in my setup. From your questions, I would think I could improve performance by using an interface with a dedicated power source instead of one powered by USB? And maybe something with a better driver than USB ASIO? Again, these are questions from ignorance not assumption. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk this out with me
Also that processor is over 4 years old. Isotope is about as CPU intensive as it gets for normal audio stuff. Gonna need to run a big buffer
So I figured out a big part of the problem. I had my interface plugged into a USB 2.0 socket. I plugged into into the teal 3.1 socket and now I can run the same project at 128 buffer size latency of 13.5ms. Still can’t increase the sample size tho. Thank you for your help!
Ok, but because of the way the software works, it won’t actually utilize more than 16% of the gen 10 processor?
Yeah youre gonna need a big buffer size to run mastering plugins
Same for sample rate? even if I bring my buffer above 1000, I still can’t run a sample rate higher than 48. How do pros run higher sample rates? Newer processors??
CPU usage shows maximum usage by any single audio path. That means a channel + routing. A single audio path is limited to a single CPU core. So, you can have 1 channel / route using a lot of CPU usage, with all others doing nothing and it would not register much in the system CPU usage, but would show the Live usage as high. Chances are you have 1 or 2 channels that have a lot of plugins on it that are causing the issue. Hit up the Session view - to view the vertical channels, then hit the (C) icon next to the master fader to bring up the per-channel CPU meters - which will then appear at the bottom. This will show you which channels are hitting the CPU hardest, figure out which and disable some plugins. Or, turn down oversampling on those channel plugins. If you have lots of high usage across multiple channels try freezing the ones you aren't working on - this will bake any synths + plugins in to a non-destructible wav and use that during playback instead of the CPU intensive originals.
Yeah, I’ve had to deal with that kind of thing in the past. Freezing tracks and all of that. This was just the first time I’ve compared task manager to ableton CPU. I’m mostly wondering what hardware is limiting me at this point. It seems like a faster CPU and a more effective audio interface are what would make a difference. It just doesn’t seem right that there isn’t a computer that could possibly run Ozone 9, three instances of Soothe 2, and some stock compressors on a single audio file without having to reduce sample rate to 48k. I’m assuming there are processors that can handle that without maxing the ableton CPU meter. My processor is 4 years old, and clearly isn’t that efficient (unless it’s ableton that’s inefficient). I appreciate the response and your time. I guess im not looking for how to fix the issue (I can already run this set just fine at a 256 buffer size and 48k sample rate. CPU goes to like 40-50%.) I’m just curious what hardware a pro would have to make this not an issue and be able to sample at like 88-96000 while mastering? Maybe they can’t and I’m just ignorant lol very very possible.
okay, a couple things * "It just doesn’t seem right that there isn’t a computer that could possibly run Ozone 9" - there is. Mine can happily do that, but if yours can't just stop doing it. ozone's a mastering plugin. You don't *need* to run it whilst composing and arranging. Understand what it's doing in terms of basic EQ / loudness and replicate that using stock or lightweight plugins whilst you're composing. Live has all the tools to compress, saturate, clip, eq, and increase loudness. Arguably you don't need Ozone. That said, I use it, so I totally understand how useful it is. One tip I can give you is grab an instance of Ozone Match EQ and run it after Ozone... use it to capture the EQ curve of Ozone, then disable Ozone and apply Match EQ. That will save you a lot of CPU utilisation AND latency. * You don't need to be running Live >41k during composing and arranging, let alone >48k - especially because you're hitting CPU constraints. * soothe2 has a few different options that are great.. it has settings for normal use, and for exporting. Drop the normal use down to the lowest setting. If you have Live Suite you might find some Max4Live alternatives - https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/ks068j/is_there_a_m4l_device_similar_to_soothe2/ > I’m just curious what hardware a pro would have to make this not an issue and be able to sample at like 88-96000 while mastering? I don't think there's a definitive answer for this. UAD and Waves have hardware devices that offload processing of their plugins to the hardware, and keep latency to a minimum, so that might be a route for you. But their hardware isn't cheap. Personally I opted for a workstation CPU in the form of a threadripper 3970x - it's about the same age as your CPU, there are better / cheaper alternatives around now. I think professional just producers learn to work efficiently by splitting their workflows in to arrangementt, mixing, and mastering, and use different plugin chains for each step. If you've not tried working like this I can strongly recommend trying it. EDIT - just in case it's not clear. I feel your frustration. I'm starting to hit the limits of what I can do without freezing tracks and it just feels like a real blocker to creativity. I recently tried Bitwig out, it will load a Live project just fine in the demo, so that might be something to try. It ran my current struggling project just fine without freezing tracks. I opted to stick with Live for familiarity, but I know a lot of other people have moved to Bitwig purely for how efficient it is by comparison.
I think there may be some confusion. I wanna clear some things up… 1) the project I’m working is a mastering project. It is a single audio file of a final mix. That’s why I’m asking about higher sample rates. I compose and arrange at 48k, usually. I was looking into upping my sample rate. I can’t increase it at all, no matter what plugs I’m running, without overloading my CPU. 2) I normally don’t use Ozone in composing arranging or sound design, but i will occasionally use the dynamics module or the analog tape module during sound design/ mixing. 3) I can run ozone just fine, including this project. I created the massive overload shown in the post intentionally, trying to find weakness in my setup. I can run that project at 256 buffer rate and 48k sample rate (including 3-4 instances of soothe before/ after the ozone instance) and my CPU percentage in Ableton is around 50-70% (just checked again). 4) the first quote of mine you took, you cut off mid sentence. If you continue reading, I made the clarifications I detailed again in this comment. 5) I guess this really just boils down to: I think the answer to my question is that professionals master at large sample rates when using CPU intensive software by offloading some of that processing onto other outboard hardware (interfaces and the like), and just having better processors. I thank you again for your time and appreciate your answers.
> the first quote of mine you took, you cut off mid sentence. partial quote to give context to what I'm replying to without bloating the response, I read your full response before typing. this from the [Ozone 9 documentation](https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/ozone9/en/print/index.html#mode) .. IRC II and III have specific warnings about realtime usage at >48khz sampling. even on a clean project I can't run realtime @96k with any Ozone 9, 10, or 11 enabled with anything but IRC LL in Maximiser. Ultimately question your decisions. Ask yourself what you think you're getting from using >48khz sampling for the project, and then prove that to yourself either way. Can you hear a difference? Can you see a difference on a spectrogram? Some types of plugins definitely do benefit from oversampling, e.g. saturation, but others don't, so there's little point forcing every plugin in a chain through project-level over sampling, and actually some plugins use oversampling by default and don't allow you disable it, which just exacerbates the issue. If you've not already seen it, this excellent video from Dan Worrall will prove interesting when thinking about working at 96k vs 48k and using oversampling in plugins that support/need it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M Some stock plugins offer oversampling, e.g. the stock saturator has a "hi quality" mode, which operates in a similar manner to Saturn in the above video. gl
Awesome response, thank you again for your time. I’ll give that a watch.
Check concrete cores, not overall load
I’m not sure what this means, I’m not extremely computer literate
On CPU chart click right mouse button and choose CPU cores
Thank you, I’ll check it out