Drop outs using Ableton and Traktor

hey there all

I have a macbook pro i7 2.66ghz with the turbo charge thingy running 4g of ram, now im a musician and i basicly run 2 rather powerful programs at the same time (ableton 8 and traktor scratch pro) these both tax a fair bit of cpu and im starting to see my MB slowing down whilst using them and i am fining that there is some small audio drop outs, and im thinking it maybe because the mac is hiting its max cpu and jamming abit.... not that long ago i had a thread about upgrading to 8g of ram and a couple of people said "no one needs 8g of ram" well am i wrong?? Would a simple Ram upgrade fix this issue??

And what steps would you recommend to take to make sure that there is maximum speed available, i just want to stop being nervous each gig that there is going to be audio dropouts that make me look like a idiot!!

thanks

I just read that other thread here and no one said "no one needs 8g of ram".

The fact is very few folks need 8 GB of RAM. Using your machine in a professional capacity, you might. I would not suggest that upping the RAM would lead to taking care of your issue though.

The answer lies in looking at your RAM and CPU usage while running the apps to see what is being maxed out. If you're seeing less than 500MB free memory while running both apps, then you "might" see an improvement with more RAM; less than 250MB - you probably would see some improvement. If the issue is that one or the other of these two apps are not making proper use of the multi-threaded capabilities of the CPU or are fighting each other for CPU clock time, more RAM probably will not help at all.

Just on a quick google search, it would seem that a lot of folks had a lot of CPU usage issues with Ableton 8 dropping out - both in Windows and OS X - though apparently not as bad in Windows. Some of these were fixed by making sure you're running the latest version of OS X and others by updating Ableton. There is also the mention that the size of the open window in Ableton affected CPU usage.

You might want to check the Ableton forums and Traktor forums if they have any.

(I'll move your thread to a forum where you may get more exposure and change the title so those folks familiar with your setup and software might see it and hopefully chime in.)

thanks heaps for your info so how do i check how much free mb there are while they are running??

i will test them both as soon as i know how to do it and put the results up on here, i have this question on the Traktor website as well as the ableton site trying to get as much feedback or info as i can...

again thanks for your help

Open up Activity Monitor found in Applications/Utilities. There you can look at your CPU and memory usage.

You could also try iStat Menus, although no longer free, it puts up your selection of items on the menu bar so you can see your ongoing usage. iStatPro is still free, it is a Dashboard widget.

hey man thanks here are the results with both playing it does go up and down abit though

im wondering if a clean out of my cache with improve anything?? and i think i will also close everything and test to see what my comp runs at with nothing open

cheerz

bobtomay said:

Open up Activity Monitor found in Applications/Utilities.

Click to expand...

You can add the CPU monitor on your dock as an icon:

1. First open the Activity Monitor
2. Right Click (or click and hold, or CTRL click) on the Activity Monitor icon in the dock and select ‘Keep in Dock’ (if it’s not already there)
3. Right click on the Activity Monitor icon again and select the ‘dock icons’ menu
4. From the ‘dock icons’ menu select the ‘Show CPU Usage’ item
5. There you have it, a nice little visual representation of your CPU usage, it is even separated by cores (if applicable)

Also with Activity Monitor, check to see what other programs are running in the background that you can stop that are CPU hogs (Bluetooth, Airport, Adobe Flash).

And yeah... defintitely max out your RAM. ;D

Hi there! I have the same issue.
I have a new MacBook Pro with a i5 - 2,4 Ghz processor, my HD is 5400 rpm.
I run Traktor Pro and Soundflower to switch my audio signal to Ableton Live 8.
I used 3 audio interfaces to test: Audio 4 DJ, 1814 m-audio, Transit m-audio.
A random audio drop-outcomes out with all three interfaces.
Can I ask what kind of hard disk you use on your Mac?
I ask you this because I tried a lot of tests: cpu usage, ram usage and temperature are all perfect also when drop-out appears so, probably we have to try a 7200 rpm HD because I tried to use the same configuration on my friend's Mac that have the faster HD and it's all perfect but he have a dual core sistem and I don't know if the new processors we have can have some problem expecially with Soundflower scripture.
I wait for your answer. Maybe we can solve the problem together!
PS: sorry for my poor english, I hope I was clear!

if you are running alot of audio tracks off the internal drive it would benefit to have faster drive. however i usually only get audio drop outs (in logic and pro tools) when i max out my cpu, so im stumped as to why yours is acting up.