Hey everyone! We’re trying to add a light show via Beam 2 to our live performance. The project file on the machine running our backing tracks is quite large (around 30GB), with 18 songs, video files running natively in Ableton, a lot of MIDI patch changes, automations, etc. There are no plugins loaded in Ableton though. The project file does take a long time to load initially, but once it’s loaded, it works just fine.
When Beam 2 is loaded up, it slows things down big time. Once the project is opened, there are at least 2 instances of spinning wheel of death, each about 10 seconds long. Everything starts to take significantly more time (3-4 times longer), things like duplicating or deleting tracks. In the lower left corner of Live, the samples load bar & video files take significantly longer to load: 20-30 seconds vs. less than a second without Beam 2 loaded. After the song is launched, the beat counter & play button indicator freeze briefly. It gets worse: sometimes the project just freezes for 5-10 seconds, and doesn’t react to any transport commands (stop, next, previous). Breaks in the audio start to happen, which we cannot afford to have during an actual live show, as we’ll be off the click instantly. The CPU indicator in Ableton spikes (it does happen without Beam 2 occasionally for a brief second, but causes no noticeable lags or glitches). On average it’s around 20-22%, without Beam 2 - 14-18% when the song is playing with the video.
MacBook Pro 2016
2.9 Ghz Intel i7
16GB 2133 Mhz LPDDR3
Monterey 12.6.7
Ableton Live 11.2.10 (also tested 11.3.26)
Gonna try to test it on an M1 MacBook Pro tomorrow, but would like to hear any recommendations or if anyone had similar issues. Machine delegation is a thing I’m aware of, and later down the road we might get there, with Resolume running on a different machine, and perhaps lighting software too, but having 4 laptops around the stage is a bit problematic right now, so I’m trying to run those things off of 1 for the time-being.
not sure I understand the question about how many Beam devices are in the live set. Here’s what it looks like. If you mean how many tracks / automations are controlling the light show, roughly 6-8 per song, and we only got to testing 5 songs, so roughly 40 MIDI tracks.
Tested on M1 last night, came across a completely different issue where the lights (even in test mode) have like a 5-second lag. We’re using DMXis as an interface, gonna try to pick up something else and test again, although that wasn’t a problem on an Intel machine at all…
As far as DMXIS goes, please see this post (I would recommend getting an Art-Net node instead):
Regarding Ableton Live performance issues, it unfortunately sounds like you were close to the limit of what your computer can deal with and with Beam devices added to your Live Set that threshold is crossed. The Intel series of MBPs from that era suffer from overheating, which results in throttling (CPU slowing down to decrease the temperature) and spikes in performance. While many of those machines have quite capable hardware on paper, these issues make them unreliable for live performing.
The Mac computers with Apple silicon (even a base model Mac Mini M1) offer a much more stable and predictable performance.
Please let us know how it goes with your M1 machine in this regard.
It is a bit unfortunate that my answers to both of your issues are basically “buy new stuff”, but as a small software team we can only offer so much support for hardware that was not designed to last.
Hi @majormoment, we just shipped Beam for Live 2.0.5 which improves the way Beam Instrument and Effect devices communicate with the Beam application and reduces the chance of audio dropouts happening under certain circumstances (such as enabling many devices simultaneously). Perhaps it also improves the performance of your set. However, at least Max 8.5.6 or later is required for the change to have any impact, but as far as I can remember Live 11.2 ships with Max 8.3, so you would need to use Live 11.3.20 (which bundles Max 8.5.6) or later.
Thank you for replies, Luka. Gonna test the new version of Beam and see what it does. I have no problem upgrading my machines when need to, I was just under the impression that Beam devices are super easy on the CPU, as all they do is basically control MIDI / DMX. An alternative could be delegating the load, and having a separate machine responsible for just lighting.
Beam is overall rather lightweight, both the Beam Instrument & Effect M4L devices (which don’t do any processing besides sending the automation parameters and MIDI notes to the application, and receiving information about the connection & fixture patch), as well as the Beam application that does all the processing and generates the DMX output.
Sending data between the devices and the application is in itself a lightweight operation, but when a Live Set contains many Beam devices, you might start to see an impact on the overall performance. This impact may not be constant, it could be periodic spikes whenever you change a lot of parameters at once. When a computer is already busy processing audio & playing video (which on Intel MBPs causes the computer temperature to raise and therefore CPU clock to slow down really soon) it may not take a lot to reach the performance threshold.
With the 2.0.5 update we made some changes that make it less likely for possible performance spikes to directly affect audio. We are always looking for additional improvements in this area. As I mentioned above, all this is far less likely to occur on machines with a more constant CPU temperature profile.
An alternative could be delegating the load, and having a separate machine responsible for just lighting.
I assume you are referring to Beam’s Networked Mode, which allows you to run Beam on another machine than Live. However, Beam’s Instrument and Effects devices in this scenario still run within Live and need to communicate with the Beam application on the other machine.
With Beam, this optimization in practice mostly only makes sense when you are generating very many universes of DMX. This feature was primarily developed for Videosync, where running Videosync’s application on another machine means entirely offloading video processing to that (usually more GPU-powerful) engine.
You could technically run the Beam devices in a separate Ableton Live Set on another machine, but then you’d need to find a way to synchronize the two sets and you’d loose all the benefits of the integrated audio-visual workflow within a single Live Set.
