Ableton vs. SONAR - CPU Shock!!

[Hunter]

Aha; its actually a sticky in the Sonar Forum:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=750994

ahaaa,I see.

[Carl Jacobson [CAKEWALK]]

exactly.. Cakewalk must be using some exotic ancient definition of the word 'gap' because gapless in this reality is definitely is not. It doesn't have to be and Sonar is a great host but why they insist on calling the audio engine gapless is beyond me.. maybe the marketing guys have vetos

Hi, I'm one of the "marketing guys" at Cakewalk. I challenge you to show me an example where we are referring to SONAR 5's engine as gapless. Seriously take a look.

There are way too many variables that come into play with SONAR to be gapless in all possible playback scenarios. The engine does "gap less" than it did ever in the past, and as a user I find it to be very smooth in performance, but I would not allow us to make an untrue statement like 100% gapless in our marketing materials.

[WillieJenkins]

Eric, if your music PC is dual core then your own experiences look to me like they tie in with my test result and whyterabbyt's findings. If your PC is single core then there does seem to be a contrast there, which no doubt highlights how system-specific these types of results can sometimes be.

I have a single core AMD Athlon chip.

However, there's one more "wild card" in your example, which is that you seem to use a lot of RAM-hungry plugs. For example Trilogy loads every patch directly into RAM, and each patch can be 128MB. RMX is far worse than that. Once you get low on RAM, the CPU will struggle to keep up with everything - especially in real time (i.e. in Live). The solution is to freeze just those tracks that are RAM-intensive. In your example freezing the RMX and Trilogy will probably solve your problem at a stroke.

There is plenty of free RAM in both applications in the above scenario, however, I could do the same thing using 1-2 instances of minimonsta, 2-3 instances of z3ta+ and one instance of battery2, which would be 90% cpu intensive and 5% ram intensive with the same results.

Another variable introduced in your example is Live's warping, which can use a fair amount of CPU grunt, especially if you select "Complex" mode. If your percussion loops are audio and you are warping them (which presumably you are by default if they are "loops") that will be using CPU. (Make sure they are set to "Beats" mode for warping by the way, if you didn't already know that).

This is using unwarped loops . In my usual workflow, percussion loops are "beats" and vocals are unwarped, but even when turning all warping off, live will die before sonar will.

I hope that helps... even if it doesn't exactly answer the question! As was said before, it's hard to directly compare sequencers' CPU consumption because there are too many variables. That is why I kept my initial test so very simple (to minimise variables). Both are excellent programs which I regularly use, and CPU is not a significant issue for me in either. But I remain keen to see how Dual Core support in Live 6 will affect things.

Yeah, I wasn't really looking for any answers, I've been using DAWs for about 5 years now, it just "is what it is" I think. My post was just to show a counterpoint of how my real-world usage of both apps
doesn't show the same results as your test scenarios.

The one major tangible difference we did have was that your latency is MUCH higher then what I use, as I'll use 64-128 in most/all cases. Cranking it up to 256 may alleviate some of Ableton Live's CPU issues, but I've been so busy with work, I haven't had a chance to test it.

Thanks for the suggestions tho!

[headquest]

The one major tangible difference we did have was that your latency is MUCH higher then what I use, as I'll use 64-128 in most/all cases. Cranking it up to 256 may alleviate some of Ableton Live's CPU issues, but I've been so busy with work, I haven't had a chance to test it.

Thanks for the suggestions tho!

Cheers Eric - yes, changing the latency WILL do it for you, I am certain! (one of those "known" Live issues/fixes)

[l33troll]

Any other comments would be much appreciated.

Here's mine, do what you want with it:

In the times, when comparing Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 with Cubase VST, I noticed, on a <1GHz PC, that CPA required 100% CPU whatever he was doing, even playing back a MIDI track on hardware, whereas VST required a reasonable amount. It was true with the first versions of Sonar as well. It was in Win98, so I used a task manager clone to check this out. I believe it was the way CPA was coded.

Ms Word 97 had the same problem, a lot of low-priority tasks were claiming 100% CPU. Your computer still responded, because as soon as a normal priority task kicked in, the low-priority ones were shut off. It was very annoying because the CPU did run at 100%, and was getting hot uselessly.
M$ released a patch for this, and CPU use magically got down to 1-5%.

But AFAIK, Cakewalk never fixed that issue for their products. They continued to claim a lot of CPU cycles without really having the need for it.

Hope that's clear!

[headquest]

Hmmm.... interesting. Does anybody else know more about this point?

[D-Fusion]

Any other comments would be much appreciated.

Here's mine, do what you want with it:

In the times, when comparing Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 with Cubase VST, I noticed, on a <1GHz PC, that CPA required 100% CPU whatever he was doing, even playing back a MIDI track on hardware, whereas VST required a reasonable amount. It was true with the first versions of Sonar as well. It was in Win98, so I used a task manager clone to check this out. I believe it was the way CPA was coded.

Ms Word 97 had the same problem, a lot of low-priority tasks were claiming 100% CPU. Your computer still responded, because as soon as a normal priority task kicked in, the low-priority ones were shut off. It was very annoying because the CPU did run at 100%, and was getting hot uselessly.
M$ released a patch for this, and CPU use magically got down to 1-5%.

But AFAIK, Cakewalk never fixed that issue for their products. They continued to claim a lot of CPU cycles without really having the need for it.

Hope that's clear!

Hmm. not sure what you are trying to tell me here
I use Cakewalk sonar homestudio 4 wich is based on the Sonar 4 engine, and when i use it the taskmanager says 0% in cpu use.

I know that the old cakewalk products used to use 100% cpu all the time, but not anymore

[sonicfire]

And now the results:

SONAR 5 PRODUCER:
Both CPU cores were clearly in use, with a roughly even spread.
The overall CPU usage ranged from 18% - 33%
PF Usage was shown as a constant 386.

ABLETON LIVE 5:
One CPU Core was predominantly in use, although there were flickers from the other core, presumably due to Windows
The overall CPU usage ranged from 15% - 29%
PF Usage was shown as a constant 426.

Impressive, when you keep in mind that Live not only plays the audiotracks - it also has to do permanent timestretching in the background!!

[Bill OC]

exactly.. Cakewalk must be using some exotic ancient definition of the word 'gap' because gapless in this reality is definitely is not. It doesn't have to be and Sonar is a great host but why they insist on calling the audio engine gapless is beyond me.. maybe the marketing guys have vetos

Hi, I'm one of the "marketing guys" at Cakewalk. I challenge you to show me an example where we are referring to SONAR 5's engine as gapless. Seriously take a look.

There are way too many variables that come into play with SONAR to be gapless in all possible playback scenarios. The engine does "gap less" than it did ever in the past, and as a user I find it to be very smooth in performance, but I would not allow us to make an untrue statement like 100% gapless in our marketing materials.

Come on, Carl, you guys got caught and removed it, that's all. That's what the big stink was about last year when you had to use valuable time trying to improve the Sonar 4 engine, while working to get Sonar 5 out.

Just like the "native" VST in Version 5, which was removed from advertising quickly after it was released.

Here's a link to your old Sonar 4 copy. It's on Elderly Instruments, but it's Cakewalk's copy:

http://www.elderly.com/accessories/items/526-CDR37.htm

I spent most of my life writing advertising and managing marketing operations. There are over 1,200 Google references to Sonar's gapless audio engine.

Maybe you're new and don't know where the bodies are buried.

But don't try to bullshit a bullshitter.

[diverdee]

Ha ha - caught.
I too remember all the 'gapless' blurb re: Sonar.
Funnay.

[saturdaysaint]

The only really meaningful host CPU-effeciency comparison test is showing how many instances of a given plugin each host can run without dropping out.

[l33troll]

Hmm. not sure what you are trying to tell me here
I use Cakewalk sonar homestudio 4 wich is based on the Sonar 4 engine, and when i use it the taskmanager says 0% in cpu use.

I know that the old cakewalk products used to use 100% cpu all the time, but not anymore

My bad, I stopped those tests well before Sonar4, but who knows?, they could have kept the coding technique