!corrupt set!

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alexsg
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed Feb 28, 2007 11:30 pm

!corrupt set!

Post by alexsg » Fri Jun 25, 2010 12:21 pm

An ableton set just shut itself and now the file won't open as it's corrupted:

[not well-formed (invalid token) (at line 208157, column 19)]

AAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
I am on snow leopard, ableton 8.1.3, max4live, suite.
I have sent this .als and the error report to ableton.
Does anyone if ableton can fix the set?
Or where the versions used in recovery after crashes are usually stored?

please help!

A

alexsg
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed Feb 28, 2007 11:30 pm

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by alexsg » Fri Jun 25, 2010 2:24 pm

bump!

B-S
Posts: 85
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2007 10:38 am

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by B-S » Tue Jun 29, 2010 2:58 pm

did you try to open in any html editor and check line 208157? there must be something wrong with the token so i guess when you fix manually it should work. i might be wrong ;-]

janzak
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Dec 09, 2009 10:23 am

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by janzak » Mon May 30, 2011 11:27 am

Sup,
I just had this issue on my MBP Snow Leopard running Live 8.2 - what happened was I had just saved my set and hit Play to run the track when the computer froze up, I couldn't use neither the mouse nor the keyboard and I had to do a hard reboot.

When I opened the set again, it was corrupt (and I had some weird missing icons on the drive the set was on...) and gave me the "invalid token on line 207819" error so what I did was I downloaded TextWrangler to read the file and noticed that line 207819 was the last line in the file - and it just had a blank space " " on it.

So I deleted that blank line, making the document 207818 lines long and bam - it opened!

Hope this helps someone googling this since this was the only hit I got from searching for this error... ciao!

gmervine
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 2:57 pm

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by gmervine » Sat Jan 26, 2013 4:40 pm

I suspect that I've got the same problem. But I can't manage to open the project with the html editor TextWrangler. Mac 10.7.5. Any tips? It's the .alp that I should open, right?

h3rtz
Posts: 252
Joined: Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:35 am
Location: Beijing

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by h3rtz » Sat Jan 26, 2013 7:24 pm

I have no idea whats going on with your set, but according to my experience there's an easy cure. Just send your file to the ableton support. When i had this kind of issue they fixed my set in less then 12h.

It was just one wrong letter in the code and nothing worked anymore. Nothing bad happened after that ever since. Ableton support rules!

jestermgee
Posts: 4500
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:38 am

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by jestermgee » Tue Jan 29, 2013 4:45 am

Make incremental backups!!!

Like anything important, never rely on a single copy being safe. Every time you create new ideas in your set, save as another file. That way should a set crash on save or become corrupt you may loose a couple of ideas, but not the whole project.

I think sometimes it takes a few losses like that to set in concrete these ideas.

TheRightBros
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Oct 02, 2011 11:14 am

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by TheRightBros » Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:59 am

yea I had a similar problem. a plugin in my template setup would crash ableton on start up. that ready sucked at first because it basically meant I couldn't open up ableton at all to even change the template. I opened up another session, clear it out and started dragging tracks from my corrupt template session one by one until I found out what was the cause. it was Reaktor. and to this day I don't put vsti's in my template session.

metaparadigma
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Mar 25, 2013 3:31 pm
Location: Berlin
Contact:

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by metaparadigma » Wed Jan 01, 2014 10:43 pm

For the matter of completeness and as a tiny help for the guys technically interested. I had just the following situation:
  • I accidentally deleted an ableton set (.ALS file extension) from my local NAS server at my place
  • I dont wanna go into detail, but since I dont have a RAID NAS I could recover the desired .als file by putting the NAS' drive into my old PC with XFS Explorer (absolute recommendation) and restore the found data to an external USB drive
  • after loading the recovered ALS file, I encountered the corrupt file error from Ableton
So what I did on my Mac:

1. I made the ALS editable
  • the ALS file is ZIP compressed
  • I renamed it to .als.zip and unpacked it
  • you can then load the als file into BBEdit (don't use Ultraedit - at least on a Mac it keeps crashing with loooong als files)
  • BBedit recognizes the ALS file now as XML file
2. I restored the XML structure
  • I loaded the corruped .als file AND a default.als file into BBEdit (I needed to unpack the default.als file aswell - as it is also zip compressed)
  • a) I closed all open XML tags in my corrupt .als file
  • b) I then loaded the corrupt .als again file into ableton
  • c) Ableton told me the line number of the error (in my case this was the last line, as parts have gone missing)
  • d) I compared the default.als file to the corrupt als and copied the missing parts from the default.als into my corrupt als-file
  • e) I started Ableton again and loaded the corrupt .als file - Ableton told me again about the wrong parts
  • f) after I fixed the structure, Ableton tried to load the file, but told me then "Track has more send knobs than set has return tracks."
  • g) and another round back again in BBEdit: I only had to align the amount of the available sends
  • h) eventually the file loaded and the only thing I had to fix in Ableton was the BPM (as it defaulted to 120BPM), but hey that's really nothing...
Although I consider these steps as not entirely noob compatible, I think it might be a good learning curve...

Hope this helps someone :D
Big ups to Ableton - your XML parser and the detailed debug messages that popped up, helped me a lot to get this done. Really outstanding!!!

happy new year 2014, folks :D


P.S. after being able to open the ALS file again, I today encountered issues with sending midi to external devices 8O 8O 8O . So I opened a new live set and imported all tracks into the new one. So everything is fixed now!

tintala
Posts: 476
Joined: Mon Nov 29, 2010 5:37 pm

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by tintala » Fri Jan 03, 2014 4:39 am

TheRightBros wrote:yea I had a similar problem. a plugin in my template setup would crash ableton on start up. that ready sucked at first because it basically meant I couldn't open up ableton at all to even change the template. I opened up another session, clear it out and started dragging tracks from my corrupt template session one by one until I found out what was the cause. it was Reaktor. and to this day I don't put vsti's in my template session.

This exact same thing

I have been getting crashes when I click on the Arrange view window .. sent the crashes to support the said it was Reaktor, however , after removing it still crashes.

Enrico Sangiuliano
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:36 pm

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by Enrico Sangiuliano » Tue Jul 07, 2015 10:55 pm

@alexsg, several years later you SAVED MY LIFE. Thanks!

I opened my corrupt .als file with Textwrangler and restored the issues coming from the default.als structure!

kevtubio
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2017 8:19 pm

Re: !corrupt set!

Post by kevtubio » Mon Feb 12, 2018 10:35 am

metaparadigma wrote:For the matter of completeness and as a tiny help for the guys technically interested. I had just the following situation:
  • I accidentally deleted an ableton set (.ALS file extension) from my local NAS server at my place
  • I dont wanna go into detail, but since I dont have a RAID NAS I could recover the desired .als file by putting the NAS' drive into my old PC with XFS Explorer (absolute recommendation) and restore the found data to an external USB drive
  • after loading the recovered ALS file, I encountered the corrupt file error from Ableton
So what I did on my Mac:

1. I made the ALS editable
  • the ALS file is ZIP compressed
  • I renamed it to .als.zip and unpacked it
  • you can then load the als file into BBEdit (don't use Ultraedit - at least on a Mac it keeps crashing with loooong als files)
  • BBedit recognizes the ALS file now as XML file
2. I restored the XML structure
  • I loaded the corruped .als file AND a default.als file into BBEdit (I needed to unpack the default.als file aswell - as it is also zip compressed)
  • a) I closed all open XML tags in my corrupt .als file
  • b) I then loaded the corrupt .als again file into ableton
  • c) Ableton told me the line number of the error (in my case this was the last line, as parts have gone missing)
  • d) I compared the default.als file to the corrupt als and copied the missing parts from the default.als into my corrupt als-file
  • e) I started Ableton again and loaded the corrupt .als file - Ableton told me again about the wrong parts
  • f) after I fixed the structure, Ableton tried to load the file, but told me then "Track has more send knobs than set has return tracks."
  • g) and another round back again in BBEdit: I only had to align the amount of the available sends
  • h) eventually the file loaded and the only thing I had to fix in Ableton was the BPM (as it defaulted to 120BPM), but hey that's really nothing...
Although I consider these steps as not entirely noob compatible, I think it might be a good learning curve...

Hope this helps someone :D
Big ups to Ableton - your XML parser and the detailed debug messages that popped up, helped me a lot to get this done. Really outstanding!!!

happy new year 2014, folks :D


P.S. after being able to open the ALS file again, I today encountered issues with sending midi to external devices 8O 8O 8O . So I opened a new live set and imported all tracks into the new one. So everything is fixed now!
Hi,

Is there any clue on how to work this around live 9 or 10 .als files?
I just can´t get the set unpacked in order to edit it, pretty sure it was created using live 9.7.4
Neither can I contact support since I just own a trial license of live, this is frustrating as f***.

Any hint would be really apprecieted

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