Unresponsive GUI once in a while? Sounds familiar?

[Stromkraft]

Do you sometimes encounter a situation where the GUI of Live is unresponsive, yet Live responds to external commands. like from the Push?

I've had this problem that no controls anywhere, transport, clips, faders, well the lot basically, do not work at all. The whole GUI is a frozen image except for the transport position and tempo, yet Live responds fully to my Push. This have been going on since the autumn 2014 with some quite odd features:

• This only happens once until I update to a new version of Live, which includes the betas. After this one time it never happens again with that version of Live, with few exceptions**.
• If I open a second window, that window is fully responsive,
• The issue have extended since 2014 over 2 machines and 3 different installations of OSes (OS X Mavericks and OS X El Capitan).
• Live have been re-installed at least two times during this same period
• The simple way out of this issue is to restart Live. Then it is gone without any issues at all at least until the next version of Live.

Does any of this sound familiar? I'd assume it's quite rare so no need to respond with just "no it doesn't". Ideas on what could be behind such an odd bug are very welcome and general reflections too.

I'm suspecting an OpenGL issue, but haven't gotten that far with support yet. I'd be willing to use some graphical analysis tools next time this happens, but that's very seldom and I can't trigger it at will. Downloaded XCode anyway.

That I use an external display with a Macbook Pro with non native resolutions most of the time and a zoom factor of 112-118% in Live could be related. There are no other issues that I have detected with this though.



**The last 2-3 months it has actually happened more than one time with the same version. But not before that.

[Shift Gorden]

You know, in the last couple of months I have noticed that my Live dialog boxes are unresponsive - like when saving...but Push will still work in the background. But I've only noticed it when exiting out of Live and it asks me if I want to save my file...that's it. It will "hang" for a good minute or two even before I can click on any options.

[Stromkraft]

You know, in the last couple of months I have noticed that my Live dialog boxes are unresponsive - like when saving...but Push will still work in the background. But I've only noticed it when exiting out of Live and it asks me if I want to save my file...that's it. It will "hang" for a good minute or two even before I can click on any options.

Yeah, I also noticed something similar like Live takes a very long time quitting and that can include keeping dialog boxes on screen. As I keep Live in full screen in OS X I just press Ctrl-left arrow to move to another desktop. A few times Live has hung at this stage, but it would seem this is a problem Ableton has fixed these hung processes when quitting in the current versions. At any rate I'm pretty sure this is unrelated to the problem I described above.

I've now installed the development tool OpenGL Profiler that can attach to Live while it's running to attempt to get some logging done if this comes up again. Hopefully Ableton can analyse the logged data and perhaps see what's going on. Or not.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate it.

[jestermgee]

Windows 10 64bit

Have never noticed an issue like this.

[csl]

Does this occur with the Push disconnected?

I think I've encountered something similar, and suspected it was to do with the control surfaces being polled.

[Stromkraft]

Does this occur with the Push disconnected?

I think I've encountered something similar, and suspected it was to do with the control surfaces being polled.

Most of the time Push is connected, but I haven't paid attention to this. It doesn't feel like a controller issue though as Push works 100% as does the second window.
Still, it's interesting you should say that as Support have suggested I turn off PXT Live to see if it makes any difference. But I can't have it off for months and months just in case this happens again. 9.6.1b5 just got out, but I couldn't make it happen. It can happen anytime so I'll have to turn off PXT, have 100% zoom and just one display and if it doesn't happen this means nothing. It's not bound to happen, it just does. Once, whenever it feels like it.

[Stromkraft]

Update:

Since then I updated to a quadcore machine, moved my SSD to that, found a way to trigger the bug at will with a script — basically opening Live with 'tell "Ableton Live 9 Suite" activate end tell' — and made some more communications with Ableton Support and tested different things related to Ableton preferences.

Then just recently I updated to macOS Sierra with a clean install and now this issue seems completely gone (knock on wood). Which is a first for several years.