CPU

This is not meant in a bad way and does not only apply to this forum; wherever you are looking for technical help you should also provide information.

But nobody here can guess what kind of hardware you have in order to estimate what the problem is.

Now that we know that you have an older Mobile CPU and the RAM is still DDR3, it is advisable that you convert your files beforehand.

It might also be good if Native Instruments tested what CPU power was needed to convert in live mode and then added the minimum requirement accordingly.

That's exactly why it would be good if they provided a minimum requirement for it, e.g. which generation of Intel core can do it in live operation, etc.

e.g. a core i3 cpu from 2024 will probably be considerably faster today than a core i7 which is already very old etc.

When the full performance is called upon you will notice the differences that you didn't notice before when playing music normally.

The IPCs have increased significantly in recent years, so yes.

So far the bottleneck for me isn’t the CPU, it’s the memory. I have a MacBook Air M1, 8gb, and only converting stems one after the other, I get the memory pressure to level 2, paging starts and I get audio dropouts. There also seems to be a memory leak, as the memory used by Traktor in Activity Monitor keeps getting bigger and doesn’t come down once the stems are done.

Ultimately, no big deal, but you want to be cautious about converting to stems while playing, as the only way to shrink Traktor memory use back down is to relaunch it.

CPU use is very reasonable and well throttled, I had zero issues with it.

No software update can solve this. You are using 9 year old hardware and Mac CPU power has increased a lot since then. Fast stem separation needs modern hardware and those requirements will only go up if we want better real time stem quality. But at least with Traktor you are actually still able to use your old hardware with stems, just generate those stems ahead of time.