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The perfect Ableton home production machine...


gn!uz
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I'm ready to make the big switch to Mac. Have been playing around with osx86 since day one and can't wait to get the real thing with Leopard arriving soon.

Music and video is my life and I use my puter mainly for progressive house production. My current system is a P4 3.6GHz Prescott (damn those things get hot!!) with only 1Gb ram.

With 4 concurrent vst's it starts collapsing..

 

My intention was to buy a Mac Pro 2.66GHz and upgrade that to the max once the price of the Quad CPUs fall down a little. Now that the new iMac's have arrived I must say I'm in love with them 24inchers.. Up it to 4Gb and go for it.

 

Currently working mainly in Cubase 3 but would like to make the switch to Ableton as this seems the way to go for my style of making music.

 

But I need some more input on which system to go for..

 

Not those, if you have the money go for the pro. I know.. I prefer not to have another case-case, you know? Looking at the iMac alone makes me wanna produce!

 

So, any guru´s here willing to convince me?

 

I'm used to arrange a track from beginning to end with all vsts active at the same time.. It seems Ableton asks for another way of producing. More dynamic! Create grooves and downmix to audio instanty and edit that...

 

Try me!! :dev: Can't wait.. Oh, and I will bootcamp/vmware with xp/vista

 

Many thanks!

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ableton live performs pretty good on all the newer c2d macs. the current iMacs look great, they even abandoned the GMA950 on the smaller models and they also provide all necessary usb / fw ports, but bear in mind that you can't use any PCIe cards at all. most usb and firewire audio interfaces will still take a certain percentage of CPU load, so PCI/PCIe is still the best solution on the audio side. you may also want to add some sort of DSP cards later. of course most manufacturers are already offering firewire-based DSP solutions, but then you may come to the point where you run short on fw ports on an iMac. just my 2 cents. so well, I'd say "if you have the money, go for the pro" :)

 

as for leopard, its a fully grown 64bit OS, right? I have never tried the current leopard betas, so I'm not sure how exactly they continue to support 32bit apps and how compatible any possible 32bit adaption will be to ableton live (live is 32bit only). also, live uses the older carbon API. afaik apple has already announced to entirely abandon carbon and just continue with the new cocoa API. if this is the case in leopard already, ableton will need to fully reprogram live. I guess that could take a while. I'm pretty sure leopard will be great and all that, but as with any new OS version apple has released, leopard will surely bring a lot of extra confusion to all users as far as software and driver compatibility goes. [this is just pure speculation, don't take that too serious!]

 

c.

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as for leopard, its a fully grown 64bit OS, right? I have never tried the current leopard betas, so I'm not sure how exactly they continue to support 32bit apps and how compatible any possible 32bit adaption will be to ableton live (live is 32bit only). also, live uses the older carbon API. afaik apple has already announced to entirely abandon carbon and just continue with the new cocoa API. if this is the case in leopard already, ableton will need to fully reprogram live. I guess that could take a while. I'm pretty sure leopard will be great and all that, but as with any new OS version apple has released, leopard will surely bring a lot of extra confusion to all users as far as software and driver compatibility goes. [this is just pure speculation, don't take that too serious!]

Oh man... you're scaring me right here. I thought Apple above all would have sorted the 64bit stuff out. Well, with MS we're used to all kinds of nonsense, can be assumed as a default, can't it? ;) but Apple?... :P

Would that mean I'd have to wait for a new 64bit Cubase version? I was thinking of jumping on the MAcPro as well when Leopard is out.

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Ableton is a great piece of production software, but it will be interesting to see once Leopard is out how soon more companies start offering 64bit products.

 

There has been a true 64bit operating system on the pc side for a while, but most audio manufacturers are slow moving over to that architecture. I know there are discussions as to what is gained and lost by going up, but I think when enough people start pushing for it there will be a major change over.

 

I've had a chance to play with the 64bit version of Sonar, but aside from being able to address more memory I didn't see any improvement in track count. Actually most of the time I saw more cpu usage than when I was running the same software on my 32bit partition.

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I've had a chance to play with the 64bit version of Sonar, but aside from being able to address more memory I didn't see any improvement in track count. Actually most of the time I saw more cpu usage than when I was running the same software on my 32bit partition.

 

Well a 64bit OS means that you can work with larger numbers, but performance-wise it won't improve anything on the audio side, apart from being able to address more memory of course. I find the 64bit hype a bit ridiculous. Most people think they get twice the performance out of it. ;)

 

As for Leopard, I'm quite sure they've implemented an adaption which lets you run 32bit apps as well, but I'm not sure how stable that is or if there will be any incompatibility issues with that. Ableton now officially supports Vista, but only 32bit Vista versions. From their FAQ:

 

"All 32-bit versions of Vista are supported. 64-bit versions of Vista may work to an extent, but Ableton does not currently support these versions."

 

Not sure what this means for the Mac platform. I guess we'll have to sit this one out.

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you know that you actually have to pay for ableton live? dont forget that when you are switching from a cracked version - the last fully running version of life on a mac (without having to pay) is version 4.

 

so let some money over to buy this piece of software...

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Yeah they have a pretty clever copy protection engine. Same goes for the PC platform as well. Live seems to be uncrackable. I finally bought it when the crack stopped working. The software is worth every penny though, so I have never really regret it.oops, did I just said I used cracked software? I never did of course. ;)

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Hi gn!uz

I use to play around with Sonar Producer Edition along with Band in a Box in a P4 3.0 Ghz and 1Gb on Ram, I play most of the instruments. But when I convert the midi tracks in audio tracks is when start to gave me a hard time, so I change over Ableton quite a amazing program, I am still using Sonar and B B and transfer those files to Ableton convert the midi files in audio thru Vst plugins but still after 7 or 8 files of audio I got drops. So I buy the Imac 24" with 1Gb of Ram, but still having problems with drops, I play around with the Ableton settings but still nothing, I am guessing that may be lack of memory Ram. I dont know.

Any suggestions?

Thank you

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Thanks for them replies all!!

 

Yesterday I ordered the 24" iMac (2.8GHz, 500Gb) will stuff it up to 4Gb... Oh, and ordered the iPod Touch 16Gb also.. Couldn't resist!

Next stop is Ableton Live (Student Version!) and a firewire soundcard.. Anyone have some advice on this? I want high quality hardware, hq drivers and only need midi, 2 outs (perhaps optical out) and low (zero) latency. I don't care about ADAT's IO Clocks 16 ins/outs.. RME Fireface? Echo Audiofire2? Difficult decision!

 

I'm not into Sonar at all.. I started producing with Cakewalk 3.0!! Now that was cool! :)

 

Í've just played around with Ableton a few times and read a lot of stuff about it but this is definately the thing for me! Can't wait... I'll let you know when the stuff has arrived!

 

Thanks!

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  • 3 weeks later...

If you don't want latency issues don't sleep on the word clock, it makes your whole sound setup alot more stable in general(latency is a timing issue). For audio i would go with the motu ultralite if i had the money, that little thing is a beast. It does everything you could want pretty much, is extremely compact, has nice LED readouts, doesn't hiccup, and is bus powered. I think it's about 500 US dollars which is comparitavely cheap as I've seen units with about half the functionality for twice that. If you want to go high end I have heard that the new apogee units are very nice and are integrated into core audio and logic somehow, I know they have a virtual patch mixer which creates separate virtual channels of audio buses, which in my opinion is one of the keys to getting your digital audio sound up to t he next level. RME has always been considered top-tier so you probably won't go wrong by choosing any of thier products either. I love the sound I have gotten from all of the emu products that I have had and they are cheap too. I don't know if they have wised up and written a mac driver yet though or if they released a usb version of thier 0x0x systems, but for digital they are still my favorite. You definitely burned yourself by forcing the lack of pci audio and added latency to your systems, if you don't use a laptop as well as your imac, then that was very stupid of you. --Ableton tips for the guy with the 1 gig system getting cracks in his sound. Try to cut your loops down as close to 4 beats as possible and make sure u toggle the RAM switch in the clip window so that the program is putting the sample into RAM instead of continually having to go back and forth from the hard drive. From what I understand the HD is usually the weakest link speed wise especially if you have different clips scattered on different physical locations on your drive. Remember that your drive has different physical areas that it reads from, and just because two clips are in the same folder in the file manager does not necessarily mean that they are right next to each other physically on the drive, so if you don't do something to offset this you might actually be telling the drive to read from two places at once! Making them load into RAM seems to help a lot, as does having a separate drive or partition just for your project folder which you would use like a swap drive. I have gotten good results using a utility called audio finder to pick my sounds out ahead of time, then putting them onto a 2nd drive that I had partitioned out into 2 partitions, with the first 20% being used as the swap and the 2nd 80 % for archiving my sound and samples library This also ensures never having to wait for the program to search for samples if you re-install or are on a different system. Saving your set as self contain might produce similar results if you don't want to go thru all those changes. Also FREEZE YOUR TRACKS! This feature is essential i would not be able to use ableton without it. You can always unfreeze if you want to make a change. If you want keep any effects unfrozen for improvisation put the fx you want to improvise with on a send or return track. Freeze every track that you are not currently editing. You can still control the mixer settings on so there is no reason to waste all that cpu usually. Also go into the audio settings and disable any ins and outs that you are not currently using. As a last resort turn your settings down to 16 bit 44.1khz and you will get a very nice speed increase. This does adversely affect your sound a bit but so does all that hissing and popping b.s. 16bit 44.1khz is still cd quality. Make sure you haven't got any other processes running in the background also: Turn off your networking entirely, get rid of all non sound services proesses and programs. Learn some terminal commands for osx if you really want to do this properly(i haven't yet so i don't know any specifics yet, will post a thread when i do, I will also try to find good articles about optimizing for sound because no computer ever is without a lot of tweaking). Hope some of that helps you, I feel your pain, I was recently working with a celeron 1.4 with only 384MB RAM and winblows xp. Still managed to get some sounds created though and i learned a lot about computers too, so f*ck it.

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make sure u toggle the RAM switch in the clip window so that the program is putting the sample into RAM instead of continually having to go back and forth from the hard drive.

 

As long as the disk usage indicator does not light up, there's absolutely no need to enable the RAM option on an audio clip. Also, an extensive use of the RAM option will only fill up your RAM quickly.

 

 

He said Ableton and Production in the same sentence

 

Errr...what? Is that one of these useless Live vs Logic innuendos?

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  • 2 months later...
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