Ableton Forum

Since I switched to using Ableton Live from Pro Tools a year ago as my main DAW I have had a lot of problems with corrupt project files.

I would say that it happens at least once a week and no project has been safe.

At first it was quite disrupting as I would find that even though I have an auto backup system that keeps stuff in the cloud and other drives, the backups would still be corrupt as it was happening on shut down.

I was used to pro tools where it can make an auto backup every few minutes, so you can easily wind back to a project from a few minutes before and not lose too much work. I am not aware of this kind of feature in Live.

Now I save a new version after any significant change or after several minutes myself. Project 1.1 then project 1.2 etc. Still, sometimes I will try to open a project and find that last two versions are corrupt and I have to roll way back and lose some work.

Ableton support have been great. I have sent them projects and they have fixed some files of big projects and really saved me, but it happens too often for me to send these all the time. It also takes a day or two( pretty good really) and by then I have usually moved past it.

On one occasion they were able to tell me what actually corrupted the file. It was leaving recorded audio inside looper. Because I didn't delete this it corrupted a file. Most times they just say that the project was corrupt from a certain point onwards and couldn't be fixed.

Other producers have told me this is just something they have learned to deal with with Live. I have never had this happen with other DAW to this extent.

Main issue is, there is no way to stop it happening.

It has happened on all versions and beta of Live 9 running a 2013 Macbook Pro on Mavericks.

Does anyone else have this issue?

I never have this problem nor have I heard of it. I haven't used Looper in a very long time though. Is it always corrupting due to Looper? I'm on a Windows 7 pc.

No. Not because of looper. That was just one live performance project. That was the only time I got an explanation from Ableton support as to why my project corrupted. I haven't used looper since then.

This happens with any project for no obvious reason.

I'd back up my stuff if I were you, that could be your hard drive dying.

I have thought that it maybe related to running projects off an external drive. It has happened on multiple drives, so I don't think it is one particular faulty drive. They are SSD too. I don't think they give fail warning signs.

This seems quite unusual to me. Obviously sometimes people do get corrupted sets, but as many and often as this seems quite weird. It makes me think theres a hardware issue, or some freaky SSD driver which likes to interrupt large filewrites. Who knows?

As an example of what would be considered normal - I've been using Live since about L4 (so nearly ten years), and I've only had one corrupt save and that was due to accidentally kicking the power cable out!

So, your experience is unusual as far as I know. I do have some functional problems with L9, but they seem very minor compared to yours! I'd grab a few memory and filewrite diagnostic tools and run them.

Angstrom wrote:It makes me think theres a hardware issue, or some freaky SSD driver which likes to interrupt large filewrites.
...
I'd grab a few memory and filewrite diagnostic tools and run them.

agreed.

another method you could try until you figure out the real problem... save the files to your desktop. after your work is finished for the day, move them to the external drives.

definitely 'Collect All and Save' and create multiple takes/versions of the set.

fangjnr wrote:Does anyone else have this issue?

Hi and good morning,
if 'this issue' or just a similar or is nothing, I don't know so I don't know if this will help:
I encountered this kind of problem with REAPER files. The reason has been a BackUp prodedure via LAN. I never understood why this has affected only REAPER files, but now it has gone, horst

That sounds interesting. Can you tell me more about this LAN backup thing?

I have my ableton project folder set for auto back up to drop box. Not sure if this could be a factor

fangjnr wrote:...about this LAN backup thing?...

Good morning again
I have used robocopy to copy changed data from the origion (laptop, desktop) to another destination. That means local removable harddrives, an other computer in the network and a NAS-server.
I did it all the time but some day I encountered, that some of these reaper files are corrupt. I published in the reaper forum and they could tell me that some lines are missing. It looked as if process of copying has been interrupted (just an assumption).
But why has that effected only reaper files?
Meanwhile - just because it is much mor easy to handle - I'm using FreeFileSync for the same procedure and I've lost trace to the problem, have never seen again.
I don't know if robocopy hasn't been such robust as it should be or something different. But you remember me to controll all my reaper files if they are still ok.
horst

fangjnr wrote: I have my ableton project folder set for auto back up to drop box. Not sure if this could be a factor

this might be the problem.

how is the "auto back up" to Dropbox set up exactly?