New Feature: a professional tool

[jonljacobi]

It doesn't crash on me often, but it does crash. Usually in very odd places such as one in the drum rack yesterday. But it's still stable enough for me to use. I don't create very large projects or stress it that much though.

Note however, that I hear the same story about almost every other DAW. With perhaps Reaper being the exception. I find Bitwig rock solid, but I just saw a thread where it crashes on boot for someone. I guess if reliability is your primary concern, then go with Reaper. It's not a DAW I particularly like, but it is reportedly extremely stable.

Personally, I like Live's workflow so much, I'll stick with it. I'd never argue against improved stability though.

[Machinesworking]

Live is average or better in terms of stability here. I've got Reaper, Logic, Digital Performer, Reason, Bitwig and Live installed. All of them the latest versions.

One thing, plug ins. VST 3 IMO on Mac OS is not the most stable, far from it. Plenty are useable, but IMO because VST 2 is tried and true, if you're on a PC use that when you can, if on a Mac either AU or VST 2. There's a reason it's taken 15 years for VST 3 to catch on and it's not laziness on the part of developers.

If you have a bug that seems to have no rhyme or reason to it, then ditch VST 3, stick with AU on Mac (where it doesn't ruin functionality), and consider purging plug ins from your plug ins folder until the culprit is found. IMO these types of bugs are 90% plug in related.

[jonljacobi]

I am now full-time Mac, and yes, I'd agree that AU's seem a lot less problematic that VST3 in Live.

[Machinesworking]

I am now full-time Mac, and yes, I'd agree that AU's seem a lot less problematic that VST3 in Live.

VST3's have been responsible for more hard crashes than any other format lately here. I started moving over to them, but I think I'm going to skip them and use AU, then VST2 when I need VSTi out functionality. CLAP is around the corner. I believe the fact that it's easy to implement and open source makes it a better solution in the long run than any of the rest. Plus, the reason CLAP exists in the first place is VST3 and how much of a PITA developers found it to be.

[jonljacobi]

Don't ask me why, but I don't see Ableton as being in a rush to support CLAP. Maybe I'll be wrong.

[goose3000]

I think what’s more concerning here is that the Devs have let a 2 page thread of people discussing the deep instability of Live without acknowledgment.

The first comment was a forum admin which may or may not even be a dev. Regardless, the issue stands true in that even on a brand new M1 Max machine, I’m getting several crashes a week using AUs and VST3. When reaching out to the devs about these crashes they told me the plugins were outdated.

These plugins have never crashed FL for me and they’re using the same Rosetta2 compatibility layer. Mind you, that’s only 2% of the plugins I use.

If Live 12 doesn’t have a sandbox for plugins to prevent the app from crashing I won’t be upgrading and will move over to FL entirely. Sad to see a company you’ve entrusted to progress and listen to the community hide in the shadows with all that extra profit from paid upgrades.

[jonljacobi]

It’s been stated many times. The forum is observed, but the devs don’t participate. They’re constantly fixing bugs so I would guess that they’re interested in stability.

[goose3000]

It’s been stated many times. The forum is observed, but the devs don’t participate. They’re constantly fixing bugs so I would guess that they’re interested in stability.

If they were interested in stability, they’d have responded with transparency on the topic years ago when it was suggested on the Centercode beta forums with hundreds of Upvotes. One of the most highly requested features with no mention from the devs.

It’s easy to sh/t on the devs, but it’s also easy to assume they’re doing something about it. Either way, no communication from them doesn’t help. Project pipelines are extremely valuable for the community to know what to look forward to and they have never o done it. By histories sake, Live 12 wont be released for another 3 years atleast- again, if these *major* concerns from the community aren’t addressed it will be time to move to a company and DAW that cares about their product and the people who use it.

Link to the Live 11 sandbox suggestion:

https://ableton.centercode.com/project/ ... ec69fa5344

Which has already been mentioned for Live 10,9.

[jacobeen3006]

Ableton 11 crashed 3 times in this year. Running 377 hours until now. Just stats…

[Machinesworking]

It’s been stated many times. The forum is observed, but the devs don’t participate. They’re constantly fixing bugs so I would guess that they’re interested in stability.

If they were interested in stability, they’d have responded with transparency on the topic years ago when it was suggested on the Centercode beta forums with hundreds of Upvotes. One of the most highly requested features with no mention from the devs.

It’s easy to sh/t on the devs, but it’s also easy to assume they’re doing something about it. Either way, no communication from them doesn’t help. Project pipelines are extremely valuable for the community to know what to look forward to and they have never o done it. By histories sake, Live 12 wont be released for another 3 years atleast- again, if these *major* concerns from the community aren’t addressed it will be time to move to a company and DAW that cares about their product and the people who use it.

Link to the Live 11 sandbox suggestion:

https://ableton.centercode.com/project/ ... ec69fa5344

Which has already been mentioned for Live 10,9.

I 100% understand your frustration, but I will say this: there is no golden goose if you're looking for a DAW with all the top notch features implemented on time and without any compromise. I'm a DAW collector, or I became one after waiting around for Live and Digital Performer the DAWs I used to get MPE support natively. So I bought and spent time learning or learning again Logic, Reaper, Bitwig and bought the upgrade to Reason.

They all have parts that are not up to "my standards". Not a soul at Ableton has stated that plug in sandboxing is happening in Live, I know of no other DAW that does plug in sandboxing. I love Digital Performer, it also does all three plug in formats, and it's less forgiving with errant plug ins, so I'm used to taking the time to get rid of or use carefully plug ins that crash DAWs.

Features like plug in sandboxing aren't something a DAW can implement overnight, it's not as easy very obviously as Articulation mapping, or MPE or any other feature people want or has been implemented. Bitwig again is the only DAW that did this out the door, and Bitwig IMO has the same issues with slow development that every DAW has. The collaboration features were a selling point over 8 years ago when it was introduced, they still aren't there. There's still massive limitations to the Grid compared to what they promised. Comping came at the same time as Live, but they didn't do MIDI comping, there's nothing like movie hosting in Bitwig, some third party VST might handle it, but that's not anything someone working on film scores can rely on long term.

Is there a point here? My point is you have choices, petition Ableton for features you want or move on, moving on you will discover other parts of your new DAW that are not as well thought out as Live and visa versa. I literally cannot name a DAW that got a feature overnight, it took Ableton years, maybe even a decade to get automation writing in clips, comping and MPE. Absolutely petition on Centercode for sandboxing if that's what you want next in Live, but there's not much anyone here can do to help other than join you if they desire.

Oh, and I'm willing to bet money that Ableton like every company wants stability, but VST3 and other things get in the way. No DAW is entirely immune from a badly coded plug in. Bitwig can hang, sandboxing doesn't fix that.

[pottering]

Ableton 11 crashed 3 times in this year. Running 377 hours until now. Just stats…

Yeah, Live saves crash data in folders for each version (Users > AppData > Roaming), it is pretty visible here how much less crashes there are since Live 9.

For me each Live 10 and 11 version progressively reduced crashes and bugs in a perceptible manner.

Had more than 3 crashes this year (14 here, 2 per month, I use Live daily, even weekends), but less than I used to for sure.

Also, that list of bug fixes someone posted is from the Beta version, not the actual full release.

https://www.ableton.com/en/release-notes/live-11-beta/

https://www.ableton.com/en/release-notes/live-11/

[goose3000]

It’s been stated many times. The forum is observed, but the devs don’t participate. They’re constantly fixing bugs so I would guess that they’re interested in stability.

If they were interested in stability, they’d have responded with transparency on the topic years ago when it was suggested on the Centercode beta forums with hundreds of Upvotes. One of the most highly requested features with no mention from the devs.

It’s easy to sh/t on the devs, but it’s also easy to assume they’re doing something about it. Either way, no communication from them doesn’t help. Project pipelines are extremely valuable for the community to know what to look forward to and they have never o done it. By histories sake, Live 12 wont be released for another 3 years atleast- again, if these *major* concerns from the community aren’t addressed it will be time to move to a company and DAW that cares about their product and the people who use it.

Link to the Live 11 sandbox suggestion:

https://ableton.centercode.com/project/ ... ec69fa5344

Which has already been mentioned for Live 10,9.

I 100% understand your frustration, but I will say this: there is no golden goose if you're looking for a DAW with all the top notch features implemented on time and without any compromise. I'm a DAW collector, or I became one after waiting around for Live and Digital Performer the DAWs I used to get MPE support natively. So I bought and spent time learning or learning again Logic, Reaper, Bitwig and bought the upgrade to Reason.

They all have parts that are not up to "my standards". Not a soul at Ableton has stated that plug in sandboxing is happening in Live, I know of no other DAW that does plug in sandboxing. I love Digital Performer, it also does all three plug in formats, and it's less forgiving with errant plug ins, so I'm used to taking the time to get rid of or use carefully plug ins that crash DAWs.

Features like plug in sandboxing aren't something a DAW can implement overnight, it's not as easy very obviously as Articulation mapping, or MPE or any other feature people want or has been implemented. Bitwig again is the only DAW that did this out the door, and Bitwig IMO has the same issues with slow development that every DAW has. The collaboration features were a selling point over 8 years ago when it was introduced, they still aren't there. There's still massive limitations to the Grid compared to what they promised. Comping came at the same time as Live, but they didn't do MIDI comping, there's nothing like movie hosting in Bitwig, some third party VST might handle it, but that's not anything someone working on film scores can rely on long term.

Is there a point here? My point is you have choices, petition Ableton for features you want or move on, moving on you will discover other parts of your new DAW that are not as well thought out as Live and visa versa. I literally cannot name a DAW that got a feature overnight, it took Ableton years, maybe even a decade to get automation writing in clips, comping and MPE. Absolutely petition on Centercode for sandboxing if that's what you want next in Live, but there's not much anyone here can do to help other than join you if they desire.

Oh, and I'm willing to bet money that Ableton like every company wants stability, but VST3 and other things get in the way. No DAW is entirely immune from a badly coded plug in. Bitwig can hang, sandboxing doesn't fix that.

Bitwig and Reaper both have sandboxing. That’s besides the point- it’s highly requested and invaluable as a feature. Especially when you consider a major selling point of Live is performing live. Legitimately, consider a scenario where a plugin crashes in a performance; how irreparable that is to the show. Better to not risk the using the plugin at all (not a solution…)

Likewise, Ableton knows their audience. In fact, they love to talk about them so much they make videos on their YouTube of the different types of people using Live. So to look at Sandboxing as something you’ll need to find in a different DAW passes the blame off on these developers who ignore its importance.

It’s been requested years ago- on live 9, and 10 respectively. To say you need 10 years to implement it is ridiculous. There’s no more to be said here on my part as it’s just echoing at this point.

[Mint Puma]

One change that would seriously improve the software reliability would be to add auto-reporting of crashes. The fact that they require me to stop what I'm doing and manually email a crash report just means they won't get the vast majority of crash reports. It's 2022, and this is kind of ridiculous.

[pottering]

Bitwig and Reaper both have sandboxing.

Sandboxing (aka bridging) adds extra CPU usage.

Reaper forums have several threads where someone complains "Reaper uses more CPU than DAW X, this is not what I expected!" where users expected Reaper to use less CPU than DAW X, usually the cause of the (relative) extra CPU in Reaper is the plugin bridging.

It is small with 1 plugin, but it adds up, with 100+ plugins it is significant.

(Again it is extra CPU usage, it is not actually needed to run a plugin at all, if the plugin is a stable one that needs no "extra security").

Some posts from Reaper's dev (Justin Frankel) also suggest it adds some latency as well (makes sense, extra processes obviously make syncing stuff more complex).

One recent example of the problems:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=266353

The option to automatically bridge all plugins by default was removed in REAPER 6.33. Bridging all plugins by default created a negative user experience in many cases, and generated a lot of support needs, because some plugins run poorly or not at all when bridged.

That's obviously an abridged (haha) version of the problems with bridging.

The extra CPU usage happens even if the plugin runs well when bridged, and Live has more users than Reaper, which means an even bigger diversity of situations and combinations of factors should be expected (plus the fact that Live is expected to be used with real-time input, unlike studio-only DAWs like Reaper).

Not only Reaper's devs and users, I saw plugin devs recommend against sandboxing/bridging, as it renders moot some of the optimization they did in their plugins.

Also, from my experiences with it, sandboxing ADDS instability.

I mean, the DAW/host may crash less (or not crash at all), but the plugins/sandbox actually crash more.

[pottering]

One change that would seriously improve the software reliability would be to add auto-reporting of crashes. The fact that they require me to stop what I'm doing and manually email a crash report just means they won't get the vast majority of crash reports. It's 2022, and this is kind of ridiculous.

I think this a privacy law thing.

(Maybe not forced by actual law, but rather the company's internal values.)

The way it is now proves by itself the user her/himself sent the data voluntarily.