Live is mostly unresponsive after PC wakes up, except forGUI

[cohamill]

I recently did a clean re-install of Windows 7, then reinstalled Live 9.7 on my machine. Everything was great at first, when suddenly some strange behavior started occurring:

Say I’m using Live. Then I need to briefly step out, so I leave Live running and just put my laptop to sleep by closing it. Later I come back and open my laptop, but things suddenly get weird. Live’s GUI is totally responsive, but the program won’t “do” anything. The play/stop/record buttons light up when clicked, but the transport never starts, and I can arm/select tracks and clips, but see no evidence that MIDI is being received so no sound is generated.

So the program is not frozen, but is also not really responding. It’s as if it’s in some type of vegetative state. The only solitary in I’ve found is just to restart Live, but on my ancient machine this takes forever so isn’t much help. Any idea what is happening and how to fix it?

Edit: This problem may have started happening after I installed Reaktor 6 on my machine. Maybe that’s related? NB: This happens even if Reaktor is not currently open...

[Tarekith]

What soundcard?

Sounds to me like the sound card drivers aren’t initializing or something like that more than a program error.

[cohamill]

Sound card = ASIO4ALL. I’ll double check when I’m home what it says in Preferences about the sound card when this problem occurs. For what it’s worth, there is no red error message at the bottom indicating audio trouble.

But would a sound card issue really affect the functionality in this way?

[Tarekith]

No idea, just a guess.

[cohamill]

So following up, I'm home now and have double checked the sound card issue. As I said before, there is no audio-related error message that accompanies this weird behavior. Looking in Preferences, everything seems fine. But I changed my sound card from ASIO4ALL to my system's card, and magically the issues disappeared and the transport controls started working again. Everything continued to be fine after switching back to ASIO4ALL. So if not a permanent cure, at least we've identified a workaround that lets me avoid needing to restart Live. Thanks!

But I'd still be interested to know WHY this is happening, and what I can do to fix it so that Live works properly as soon as I wake my PC up (as used to be the case). FWIW, it does seem to be related somehow to the sound card...

[jestermgee]

But I'd still be interested to know WHY this is happening, and what I can do to fix it so that Live works properly as soon as I wake my PC up (as used to be the case). FWIW, it does seem to be related somehow to the sound card...

Because windows (7 especially) is kind of crap when it comes to sleep mode.

Tarekith was right on the money. It's related to the fact that you have a running driver talking directly to the software on a "high level". When you place the system in Sleep mode it has to stop all the drivers and suspend software and processes. When you start the PC the timing sync between the DAW and the audio interface is lost and needs to be restarted properly which requires a reboot of the ASIO driver. Sometimes switching the audio device in live to another and back will fix it. Sometimes you need to close Live completely and re-open.

The issue is not live but Windows and can affect many other devices too. A short answer quick fix is to not place the system in Sleep mode, shutdown completely. Windows 10 is much better at managing this type of thing, not to mention it has a "hybrid" shutdown mode where it does a full shutdown but keeps a ram file of most of the system which is loaded on startup. This allows the PC to fully boot (from SSD) in just seconds instead of Minutes. Shame you didn't take advantage of Microsoft's free upgrade to win10 while it was running.

[cohamill]

Hm, that's interesting, and a bummer.

But if that is what's going on for me and it really is an issue with Windows rather than with Live, shouldn't this problem have been happening all along?

Nothing in the way I use my computer or Live (or have either set up, aside from a general HD cleaning that accompanied my recent clean Windows re-install) has changed, so what might have caused this issue to suddenly begin?

[jestermgee]

Could be a different driver/OS update, Could also be the order in which drivers and software is restored when the system is booted again. If Live or the audio interface is loaded before the actual ASIO driver then that could be the cause, Could be the case before the order in which things were activated was different.

Could be anything and i'm certainly not saying it IS the issue, just the most likely especially since you have identified that changing the audio driver fixes the issue. I have experienced the same thing myself, in fact I had to disable sleep on my laptop that runs Serato for the same reason, when I would boot it up Serato would be completely frozen and i'd have to force quit it. I just switched off sleep mode when I press the power button.

Windows can be a pain like that. I also have an issue where I have mapped network drives on my machines but on this machine I am on now the drive tries to be mapped by windows on boot before my network card drivers are even loaded and causes it to fail. I needed to design a small script to delay the mapping by 3 seconds just to overcome this. These little issues are the price one pays for using Windows.

[jdarnell2]

Hey guys... first time poster but an Ableton user for a decade+. I have to concur with the original post in that I have the exact same issue with Ableton after it comes out of sleep mode and to blame it on Windows I feel is not addressing the complete issue. This has been a problem I've noticed with Ableton since version 8 and now we're on version 10. I've used versions 8-10 of Ableton on WinXP through Windows 10 too and the problem remains. My main question is this... if the problem is Windows, why do my other digital audio software packages allow a stable recovery from sleep but Ableton does not? Could Ableton investigate, (possibly and just for an example) a "come out of sleep" mode that will begin re-scanning and loading ASIO, (or other drivers) once it starts up again after sleep? Just a suggestion and at the end of the day... I love this DAW.

[[jur]]

Could Ableton investigate

You'd better off writing about your issue to support@ableton.com
cheers
j

[Mustang55]

Not sure if this topic is still active but also struggled with this issue. Initially my Win10 was able to come back from sleep and Live would still work. Now Live just hangs after wake up. I found an easy solution: as this seems related to the ASIO driver as discussed, I just turn of the Live audio engine before I turn the PC to sleep. This is a simple click on the CPU meter in the top right corner, right to the MIDI mode switch.

When the PC wakes again, Live runs fine and I just enable the audio engine again with one click on the CPU meter. Seems pretty robust after some testing.

Hope this helps others struggling with this issue.