2015 MacBook Pro - Live 10 or 11?

[kaiservonarctic]

I've been experimenting with Live Lite for about a year and am thinking of buying either Live Standard or Suite. I've used Lite 10 and Lite 11, and it seems that my 2015 MBP (8GB RAM, 128GB SSD) is chugging a bit with 11. Has anyone else noticed much of a performance difference between Live 10 and 11 on a similar computer setup?

The only reason I haven't made up my mind for sure is that I know some of the updates in 11 are fairly significant at the Standard and Suite tiers. But all of those extra features probably won't matter so much if I can't run them anyway Thanks!

[Winstontaneous]

I'm running Live 11 on a late-2012 MBP (16GB RAM, 1TBSSD) and I don't notice higher resource usage in 11 over 10 or 9.5. That said I've been pushing the machine to its limits for years so I have the dance of "Increase buffer size to max when listening, drop it down for realtime recording, regularly render Master as audio to listen without the fans running at 6200RPM".

In my experience Logic and REAPER (plus Reason until v.10) are the most resource-efficient DAWs. Not to say that Live is slow, but I can run super-complex Logic projects without the lappy breaking a sweat. Funnily though Mainstage shares lots of code with Logic, it's an absolute resource hog on my machine, even using identical channel strips.

[antic604]

You can run any DAW at any computer, you just need to be smart about audio settings, the way you construct your project and how soon you'll need to bounce stuff to audio.

As expected, we don't know from your post nothing about your workflow or even music style (both impact performance requirements) but it's safe to say v11 is quite a substantial leap over v10 and also you're on macOS, which means you might want to eventually upgrade to newer Apple Silicon one and v10 won't support it (natively), whereas that's already present in current v11.1 beta.

[kaiservonarctic]

I'm running Live 11 on a late-2012 MBP (16GB RAM, 1TBSSD) and I don't notice higher resource usage in 11 over 10 or 9.5. That said I've been pushing the machine to its limits for years so I have the dance of "Increase buffer size to max when listening, drop it down for realtime recording, regularly render Master as audio to listen without the fans running at 6200RPM".

In my experience Logic and REAPER (plus Reason until v.10) are the most resource-efficient DAWs. Not to say that Live is slow, but I can run super-complex Logic projects without the lappy breaking a sweat. Funnily though Mainstage shares lots of code with Logic, it's an absolute resource hog on my machine, even using identical channel strips.

Thanks Winstontaneous! All of this is useful info to be honest.

[kaiservonarctic]

and also you're on macOS, which means you might want to eventually upgrade to newer Apple Silicon one and v10 won't support it (natively), whereas that's already present in current v11.1 beta.

This is especially key, since I probably will be upgrading eventually. I think that made up my mind. Thanks antic!