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Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 6:06 pm
by sirbiss
Has anyone else experienced a significant amount of crashes since 9.2 and slow performance in general, like starting Ableton, loading projects etc?
I remember when 9.2 came out that i immediately took notice of a change in program stability. Before 9.2 i never felt Ableton was unstable or slow in anyway, quite the opposite.
My PCs health is great, i keep it well maintained in every way, and all my other programs and DAWs work as smooth as always.

So, does anyone else feel like Ableton has gotten less reliable in recent time?

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 6:22 pm
by stringtapper
Live is on version 9.6.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 8:10 pm
by Stromkraft
sirbiss wrote: So, does anyone else feel like Ableton has gotten less reliable in recent time?
To me Live has become more and more stable, especially since 9.2. There are a few exceptions where I've encountered crashes and general weird behavior, but these are both rare events, and are typically not happening during sessions, or have been caused by third party plug-ins.

My attitude to crashes are that they should not happen, but the production systems we use are not completely controlled by Ableton and because of this, ruling out the other involved parts, hardware and software should get high priority.

In Live 10 I really feel Ableton need to take the next natural step and separate their code so that for instance a crash in a plug-in or driver does not take down Live and that the offender can instead be safely restarted. That's probably a big undertaking, but I think rock solid DAWs are what people expect.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 8:50 pm
by mholloway
Load times for projects and startup are ok, but for me it hangs a lot -- I get a OSX beach ball making me wait between performing basic actions far more often than I think I should be. I have a new 2016 iMac with 16 gigs ram and fancy-ass i7 processor and all that, but yeah, it hangs a lot. In a crowded session, I get beach balls just by clicking on a channel. Sucks.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 10:07 pm
by Angstrom
It's been up and down with the point numbers for me. I forget which were good and which were bad. The earliest Live 9's were absolute bollocks for me, clicking and jumping CPU, regular crash dumps. It got even worse in 9.1 and then I think crashing on start came in with 9.2 and went away during the betas for a later 9.3x . The clicking issues were slowly ironed out as we aproached the mysterious 9.5 which delivered a whole new bunch of bugs which were then ironed out mostly in 9.6.

So, 9.6 is still a little flawed for me, but 100% better than most of the previous L9 versions, for me.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 10:26 pm
by Stromkraft
mholloway wrote:Load times for projects and startup are ok, but for me it hangs a lot -- I get a OSX beach ball making me wait between performing basic actions far more often than I think I should be. I have a new 2016 iMac with 16 gigs ram and fancy-ass i7 processor and all that, but yeah, it hangs a lot. In a crowded session, I get beach balls just by clicking on a channel. Sucks.
This is all totally unacceptable and I would like Ableton to really make an effort to make these kind of issues something in the past. What I miss is more program assistance in informing the user of what the issue could be about. If not in Live itself, then on the web in a more interactive way than today.
I have suggested something about this to Ableton. It's quite likely that hardware and software interaction causes issues like these, after all music systems being real time and consisting of many products from different makers are commonly quite delicate, but you need to know about the possible issues to be able to address them.

I do see the occasional beach ball too, but that happens more often in Safari and what not rather than in Live and I always press Live to the brink. I do prefer the beach ball to audio dropouts.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 3:54 am
by jestermgee
I'd have to agree here too that (on Windows in my case) Live seems to be ticking away nicely though I didn't really have big problems in previous versions.

I have had a crash when browsing the explorer within Live when I tried to rename a file and hit ESC several times to cancel the change, it crashed, but in use it's been reliable.

In saying that though I have not been using Live much in the last few months due to other things so possibly for heavier users they are finding things much different but I believe since 9.2 to 9.6 many little bugs have been squashed.

I personally really like how Ableton are handling bugs and testing now vs Live 8 days.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:01 am
by clement.m
This is all so random. I believe that Stromkraft is right: hardware & software (other than Ableton) should probably get high priority and it is all so subjective also, it can depend on someone's appreciation of a "not crowded project" or a "well maintained computer" etc...

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 5:30 pm
by inkjt510
Live 9.5 used to beachball for me regularly until I upgraded to an SSD. Suggest you do the same if possible, and if you haven't already

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:19 pm
by Shift Gorden
mholloway wrote:Load times for projects and startup are ok, but for me it hangs a lot -- I get a OSX beach ball making me wait between performing basic actions far more often than I think I should be. I have a new 2016 iMac with 16 gigs ram and fancy-ass i7 processor and all that, but yeah, it hangs a lot. In a crowded session, I get beach balls just by clicking on a channel. Sucks.
Ableton used to be perfecto to me, until 9.6 and I tend to get the beachball/endlessly loading session frequently.

Trying to figure out if it's a certain instrument, effect combo...

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:48 pm
by pskept
stringtapper wrote:Live is on version 9.6.
smh.

anyways...

did you update from live 8 to live 9 on this machine? on my current workstation I've done several upgrades to live and max including a major 8 - 9 upgrade. so you say lots of crashes when opening projects. i was experiencing this on a regular basis. also, whenever i would add a max for live anything to the set it would crash. open a set with a max plug? crash. this is a windows 7 machine. i saw a lot of windows mentions in this thread. i just did a complete fresh install of the os, ableton and max. the exact same versions. i now have none of the issues i was having. amazing right? shortly after this i read someone on gearslutz say that they do a fresh os install and everything else every time there is a major upgrade to ableton. i'm thinking of taking up the same habit.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2016 12:55 pm
by bwax
9.2 was the single worst experience I've ever had with a bought-and-paid-for, expensive, professional-level software product. Constant crashes, beachballs and endless hangs. Max4live routinely crashed everything. Horrible. Made music making extremely painful. I was also wrapping up a long-term project at the time so it was excruciating trying to finish up.

I'm on an imac i5. FWIW, Every other bit of software I've used has always run just fine on it, so hearing the whole "it's your computer" thing got really old.

I was sooo close to switching DAWs but 9.5 came out just in time. 9.5 seemed to take care of everything. Was very quick and snappy. Happy happy. Kudos to Ableton. (Plus, this is even more proof that it wasn't my computer - it was in fact the software! Sorry to hammer that home again, but during this time there seemed to be a few people on the forum running around telling anyone who complained that it was their fault and their PC that sucked, that we were lazy/stupid for somehow not optimizing our machines, etc. That got extremely tiresome.)

9.6 seems to have introduced a bit of the old sludge, but nowhere near as bad as 9.2. I really hope Ableton continues to put a priority on optimizing code, integrating tightly with Push 2, user-friendly browser, etc. Speed and usability is where it's at for me, not endless features and bloatware. Hopefully v10 delivers big in that area.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2016 1:49 pm
by S4racen
pskept wrote:
stringtapper wrote:Live is on version 9.6.
smh.

anyways...

did you update from live 8 to live 9 on this machine? on my current workstation I've done several upgrades to live and max including a major 8 - 9 upgrade. so you say lots of crashes when opening projects. i was experiencing this on a regular basis. also, whenever i would add a max for live anything to the set it would crash. open a set with a max plug? crash. this is a windows 7 machine. i saw a lot of windows mentions in this thread. i just did a complete fresh install of the os, ableton and max. the exact same versions. i now have none of the issues i was having. amazing right? shortly after this i read someone on gearslutz say that they do a fresh os install and everything else every time there is a major upgrade to ableton. i'm thinking of taking up the same habit.
Maxforlive windows issues were fixed in the upgrade to 9.5....

Cheers
D

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2016 2:29 pm
by stringtapper
S4racen wrote:
pskept wrote:
stringtapper wrote:Live is on version 9.6.
smh.

anyways...

did you update from live 8 to live 9 on this machine? on my current workstation I've done several upgrades to live and max including a major 8 - 9 upgrade. so you say lots of crashes when opening projects. i was experiencing this on a regular basis. also, whenever i would add a max for live anything to the set it would crash. open a set with a max plug? crash. this is a windows 7 machine. i saw a lot of windows mentions in this thread. i just did a complete fresh install of the os, ableton and max. the exact same versions. i now have none of the issues i was having. amazing right? shortly after this i read someone on gearslutz say that they do a fresh os install and everything else every time there is a major upgrade to ableton. i'm thinking of taking up the same habit.
Maxforlive windows issues were fixed in the upgrade to 9.5....

Cheers
D
He was too busy shaking his head to notice.

Re: Since v9.2 Ableton is borderline useless for me

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2016 5:11 pm
by pskept
S4racen wrote:
pskept wrote:
stringtapper wrote:Live is on version 9.6.
smh.

anyways...

did you update from live 8 to live 9 on this machine? on my current workstation I've done several upgrades to live and max including a major 8 - 9 upgrade. so you say lots of crashes when opening projects. i was experiencing this on a regular basis. also, whenever i would add a max for live anything to the set it would crash. open a set with a max plug? crash. this is a windows 7 machine. i saw a lot of windows mentions in this thread. i just did a complete fresh install of the os, ableton and max. the exact same versions. i now have none of the issues i was having. amazing right? shortly after this i read someone on gearslutz say that they do a fresh os install and everything else every time there is a major upgrade to ableton. i'm thinking of taking up the same habit.
Maxforlive windows issues were fixed in the upgrade to 9.5....

Cheers
D
not for me.