Synthbuilder wrote:This can take time and I can appreciate why people don't bother. There are alternatives out there nowadays that if they work and Live does not, people just move on - see post above about Reaper.
Transfer
Good advice there, but this is how it's supposed to work. If it isn't working for me, I will move on and so should anyone else feeling this is true. It doesn't have to be looked upon as a problem. A user want to use another tool. So?
To me the
Reaper feels like a joke. The only viable transfer I can see is
Bitwig.
My experience with issues in Ableton Live (overview)
I had serious issues, I think 4 years back, and I felt Ableton weren't helping as much as I had hoped, nor did Apple that made my computer and nor Native Instruments that made my audio interface. Then I replaced the latter for an RME
Babyface and all problems disappeared at once.
Waves in templates
I then, about a year or two, later had very odd behaviour suddenly and after a few weeks with Waves support they told me I should remove their plug-ins from my personal template, so I did. All problems disappeared.
This problem may not be relevant any more, Waves have become more compatible with
Live since (Use the VSTs though).
Re-installing
Some year later I had a number of odd issues again and never found out what caused these, so I finally re-installed everything from scratch, everything associated with
Live and every single plug-in from their installers and I deleted all (music software) preferences as well. Took me a day or two and my machine was superstable again. I've done a clean install a couple more times since, but I cheat a little moving just the VSTs as is and the Ableton packs as well. Works fine.
Plug-ins are acting up
My installation of
Live practically never crashes in session, though there are sometimes small things like after I installed a specific plug-in, or updated a plug-in. Specifically
Live 9.7.3 and subsequent Waves updates have forced me to clean out Waves plug-ins completely including preferences. After re-installation and clean-out it just works just as fine as before.
Taking care of tools
So when I hear about crashing machines I think this because people are not used to take care of music production machines, or even production machines period. There's always a reason somewhere and as far as I'm concerned it's very seldom
Live that is the sole cause. I've managed to fix nearly all my issues** trough the years, quite often with great input from Ableton Support or other support teams for involved products. Hopefully I 've also given them some ideas to think about too.
Exchanging what for what?
You can change DAW and one might be more happy with another DAW than the current one, but the truth is changing DAW commonly means exchanging not only a set of features and the work flow and a set of problems to another set of features and another work flow and another set of problems. No software is perfect.
Each and everyone need to decide what they are comfortable with. It also pays off, no matter what you use, to learn about taking care of your production machine.
**Some odd issues have simply fixed themselves. I think I posted about almost all of these.