Ableton Live 11.1 is a huge deal for any musician who bought a Mac in the past year. It's now optimized for Apple's M1 chips.
Optimizing Ableton for M1 Macs: Simple Fix for Audio Dropout Issues
Musicians may be all leather jackets, Jack Daniel's, and sleeping in until the afternoon, but they're a conservative bunch when it comes to gear, especially software. The golden rule is never to upgrade a working setup unless you absolutely have to. But if you're running Ableton Live on a recent Mac, you should be running, not walking, to the updates page. Now that it supports Apple Silicon, Live is faster and uses a lot less CPU. But it's not all good news: if you rely on old plugins to power your music, you may be in for a disappointment.
"So far it's been flawless. The CPU meter seems much more stable and is a good 20-30% lower during the more hectic parts of large projects," musician and Ableton user Evpat told Lifewire in a forum post. "I also notice less spikes/dropouts when using other programs at the same time. I like to listen to my tracks while doing other tasks, and audio dropouts used to be a common occurrence if I had a few Chrome tabs open and was scrolling around, etc. but that is no longer the case."
Ableton Live is one of the most creative Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) out there. It lets you edit everything, just like Pro Tools and Logic Pro, but it’s also heavily focused on live performance, hence the name. It’s essential for running a complex project on a lightweight laptop.
