mholloway wrote:I've been a beta tester for years. I was an alpha-level tester on version 9.
I can't, and won't, try to speak for anybody / everybody else. But purely in terms of my ongoing experience with Ableton Live, the reality is that it has become an unreliable mess, and doesn't seem to be improving in any notable ways.
I send in regular crash reports. I'm not somebody who wants to be negative, who is eager to cry foul. But this shit is getting ridiculous.
On my system, an iMac / 2.7GHz intel core i5, with 16 gig ram running OS 10.10.3 and Live 9.2b8 (though these problems have been going on for months and months, that's just my current setup), I deal with the following on an absolutely constant basis every time I use Live for any serious project:
1. the entire library resets itself and performs a new scan once or twice a month. Maybe that doesn't sound bad to you. But bear in mind: the scan takes about 2-3 hours to complete, and the majority of my carefully archived "user library" content is unavailable during that time. the library rescan means that basically everything goes blank in my user library, and slowly re-appears as the scan continues. naturally it only happens when Live is open, e.g. when I'm working. I do professional work (my band, video game music, other paid projects) in Live. Imagine sitting down to do a day of paid work, and your entire, meticulously archived user library of FX racks, Instrument Racks and clips - the stuff you draw from constantly when working, organized that way because you need it -- just disappears for three hours.
1b. The library is silly to begin with, and we all know it. The reason I make such extensive use of the user library in the first place (creating an elaborate folder hierarchy to organize all my racks, fx, clips, etc) is because that entire upper portion, the Live library, is an unusable joke. It sorts every goddamn thing into single tabs, e.g. "I want to look for an instrument", well ok, here are four thousand instruments to scroll through. Hope you have a keyword search in mind! If you want your organization system to be entirely founded on keyword searches, then perhaps this library system will work for you. Otherwise, good luck wading through thousands upon thousands (because live tags and adds to this content every time you save anything, and tags poorly, I might add) of arbitrary names trying to find what you want. And guess what, performing a search is the action most likely to cause the library re-scan in point #1 above.
2. I think this is only on Mac, but I've found it corroborated elsewhere online: the dreaded "UNKNOWN FILE ID" pop-up error that occurs, oh, about 70% of the time (sometimes 90%, it ebbs and flows, inexplicably) when you try to save something in the User Library. Think it doesn't matter? It does: most of the time, the file that is saved after you click "ok" in that error pop-up is a corrupted file. If you read my point #1, you know that I save Fx Racks, instruments Racks, and clips of all kinds into the User Library, all the time. Well, that is, I'd LIKE TO, but most of the time dragging something into the User Library results in, yep, "UNKNOWN FILE ID" popping up and I have to delete the screwed up file, and try again...and again... and again....
3. Live crashes. All the time. All. The. Time. It crashes so much I only bother to send about 1 out of 3 crash logs, because, well, I'm still sending multiple crash logs every day I use the program. Sure, a lot of these crashes might be the 'fault' of 3rd party plugins. I'm not fan of bitwig, have no plans to migrate in that direction, but at least those guys figure out a workaround to deal with the reality of crashing 3rd party plugins.
4. I just loaded an admittedly large session. On my not-shabby iMac it took about 10 minutes to get the thing open, and I could hear my HD chugging along the whole time. Other programs (chrome, for example) drastically slowed down to unusable levels during this time. Yeah, I know, I should have a music-only system and not run other programs, but still: this is poor. Maybe If I look deeper into this (and I will) this point is more about my system than Live, admittedly. I don't know yet. I just know it happens on loading large sets and it sucks.
Okay. Thanks, I needed to vent.
lately, for my band, I do composition in Maschine and then export all the sequences as audio to Adobe Audition. it's so nice, because Maschine is FAST (like Live, well, used to be) for creating sequences, and then Audition provides a wealth of audio editing tools (of which Live has implemented exactly zero, save I guess for the ability to reverse an audio file, yee-haw). But for film and video game work, that approach isn't deep enough, and I really really want to keep on using Live for those projects. But I waste too much damn time re: every point above, and I'm starting to look elsewhere. And that makes me sad.
-M
The library has always been a WTF in 9. It's OK if you don't make changes in the folders. The larger the library the larger the database file is in the app data folder. I really don't get why they have Live scan this. Most DAWs don't. You add the folder in the settings and they are there to use right away.
