Maschine in Ableton - processor power

Hi there,

I know the issue has been discussed already quiet a bit. Still I wanted to share my personal case and see if you guys might have a little hint or workaround how to "solve" my case:

I have a 2,5 i7 Macbook Pro with 16gb ram from end 2014 which is actually a pretty decent computer. What I don't get is why Maschine uses that much processor power when using as a plug in Live. I have a Maschine project with 10 drumkits in it, all super simple sample based stuff, no long ambiental samples, plain short drum sounds, no efx. I even resampled all drumsynth sounds I had or sounds that used reverb and delay. So there is no plugin used inside Maschine. Still this projects eats up like 16/17% when the sample rate is set to 256. To me this does not make any sense. If I run a dozen Kontakt samplers using huge polyphonic piano libraries or loads of Massive devices on high quality setting I hardly go above 10%.
Is there any more thing I could try to reduce the processor excess caused by Maschine? I set all samples to monophonic, no plugins, no filters, nothing...
Thanks for any idea.

 

The Maschine plugin is at the mercy of Ableton's processor management.
Plugins under the Maschine plugin are at the mercy of Maschine processor management.
Sadly they won't integrate well. If you have ten tracks in Ableton each with one plugin, Ableton may only allocate 10% of resources per plugin max (I'm putting this far too simplistically but you get the idea).

Also Maschine plugin performance is crap. NI doesn't seem to want to know about that.

Consider running Maschine standalone alongside Live in sync, or bounce the performances down/transfer the midi across to a Ableton track away from the Maschine plugin.

 

Thanks for that answer. How would I run Maschine standalone while running Ableton both through the same soundcard?

 

@laurentius this is how standalone maschine master - ableton slave:




Edit: in ableton preferences, ticking only "input sync" is enough, others not necessary.

 

Thanks! And how about audio routing?

 

I dont route audio, i drag & drop audio when im done with maschine.
You can use soundflower or jackaudio if you want to route audio between programs. But id prefer to use VST instead of this.
I make drums in maschine with that setup, record all VSTs, mics, gtr, bass etc in ableton.
I do prewiev from komplete instruments from maschine but when i decide something, i open same vst in ableton and record it there.
And in the end i drag drums to ableton too (as audio, not midi).

 

Oh man, sorry I forgot to tell you guys: I am doing this live on stage No bouncing, dropping and stuff...

 

Output them seperately, you dont need to route maschine to ableton.

 

If you are just triggering samples and not really using any of Maschines features, why not just dump all the samples in to Lives sampler, you will find that to be way more efficient in the long term, and much more reliable than running any VST plugin, not that VST is particularly painful, but native instruments/effects in any host tend to run a little less in resources than plugins.

 

@Tooshka I agree, but I love programming beats in realtime with Maschine, switching between drumkits is hyperfast and especially switching between patterns vs. switching between clips in Live is much better in my opinion...

 

Well i would suggest you think long and hard before running anything standalone and synced, while it sounds like it may be "A great idea" in reality this has been around a long time with things like Rewire, and yet it is very very rarely used, because in the year 2016 we have all gotten used to total recall and when you try to work without total recall, it can very quickly become a pain that far outweighs the extra CPU you are seeing from NIs poor coding of their plugins.

 

I feel much the same when using the plugin and it's performance. Don't understand the issue about 'total recall'. It's not an SSL and both standalone products can be recalled totally.

Agreed best get away from Maschine altogether and just use it as a controller. I mainly use Geist which is far better, sadly sacrificing Maschine features. It's sad that Maschine is so buggy and underdeveleloped otherwise it could have been useful.

 

Both standalones can be recalled totally yes, you also then need to save two projects and basically double your house keeping, this may be no issue to you, but a lot of producers will simply forgo the extra little bit of CPU saved to just run the plugin and have less housekeeping, myself included, I have no intention of ever going back to the days when i had to find each preset on each piece of hardware and in a lot of cases read a pad that told me what settings to use because it didn't actually use presets or have enough presets hahaha, I'm good thanks, i will use the extra CPU.

There are other advantages to be all in in one system too

 

For my live gigs I guess I will export all my Maschine kits to Ableton's drum racks. Those kits eat up altogether 1% whereas Maschine would use around 15%. Still I miss some of Maschine's functionality (especially changing patterns quickly)...