Live 12 won't launch

[Tarekith]

I requested a refund on march 7th and to this moment no answers from ableton. Anyone experiencing the same thing?

They can take awhile to reply at the moment, but they will get back to you with your refund.

[Eanna]

To people who point out that Ableton must have known before launch....

If they did, then:
(a) They would have signalled more clearly on the Purchase page re. System Requirements. They did not. They have now changed that.
(b) They have had Live 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 running on my computers since 2008. They run native code on my computer. A Live 11 patch could "phone home" quite easily, saying "This user's computer won't run Live 12". They did not consider this.
(c) The experience of Live just not launching - appearing for a second in Task Manager and immediately dying - is such a bad end-user experience, that surely to goodness they would have put a dialog popup stating "Sorry buddy, we've compiled Live with AVX2 extensions linked in - you're out of luck".
(d) Indeed, the Installer should test this! The Live installer takes a long time to complete - testing for AVX2 capabilities should be very easy - call them, catch the error, stick up a dialog if it fails.

All this says to me, is that their internal testing, and Beta testing, were a massive fail.

As for others who hope that Ableton release a build of Live 12 without AVX2 requirement...
As I understand it, adding support for AVX2 - it's only a compiler flag. The GCC compiler supports it, for example, as -mavx2.
I.e. when you are compiling Live source code to executable binary code, you pass -avx2 to GCC on the command line, and it links in those lower-level AVX2 libraries. When that compiled executable launches - Live 12 in this case - it tries to load those AVX2 libraries declared within the program - and on a CPU that doesn't support AVX2, you'll get something like "Illegal Instruction", and a core dump.
So it must be that you can recompile Live 12 *without* this compiler flag, so it doesn't link to those low-level libraries. I will read more about this, and something called 'Intrinsics' (which are somehow related), because I am (very!) motivated to understand the tech here.

But in the meantime... Ableton - please comment.

[Flukester]

Adding myself to the list of disappointed users.

Back in November 2023, I purchased an upgrade from Live 11 Lite to Live 11 Standard, which included the free upgrade to Live 12 Standard, whenever that would be released. There were no clear indication at that time that my PC would not be able to run the v12 version of the software.

If I had known at that time, I would NOT have purchased Live 11 Standard. There is no sense purchasing a product when you know you'll be forever stuck on an old version with no patches.

I am not going to throw out a perfectly good PC with a Xeon (3.7GHz) and 128 GB of ECC RAM just for this one software.


I have opened a support ticket with Ableton, asking if they plan on releasing a build of Live 12 that does not require AVX2 extensions, or to provide a refund.

It's hard to tell how many of us are in this situation right now. Hopefully Ableton doesn't want to lose our business.

There are other DAWs on the market, which do not require AVX2 extensions.

We'll see...
Fluke

[[jur]]

a build of Live 12 that does not require AVX2 extensions

The extension is required for the Similarity Sample feature afaik, so I wouldn't hold my breath...
But, the L12 minimum requirements were available as soon as the announcement was made.

[baseinstinct]

Looks like a ray of hope. Deactivate the functionality on incapable machines and grey out the relevant button.

As I think of it, what techniques are used by plugins - none of the plugins on the market using avx2? How about the ones which tackle sample similarities, such as those from waves and xln audio's? Just a thought.

[OscManTor]

Hello,

With the "sde" application in windows11 Ableton 12 works. (Without AVX2)

1.- Download:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... lator.html

2.-Create a shortcut of sde and Change destiny propietries:
C:\Users\user\Desktop\sde\sde-external-9.33.0-2024-01-07-win\sde.exe -hsw -- "C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live 12 Suite\Program\Ableton Live 12 Suite.exe"

Change "hsw" (sde\sde-external-9.33.0-2024-01-07-win\misc\cpuid) according to your cpu id and ableton path, if is necessary.

I'm not a programmer, but it worked.
Does anyone dare to test?

greetings to all

[Rivanni]

@OscManTor
On what CPU are you running this?

[OscManTor]

Intel Core i7-3770 cpu @3.40Ghz (Ivy Bridge)
Socket 1155 LGA

[Citizen]

Can someone clarify what is the easiest surefire way to check that Live 12 will run properly on their system?

I've googled a bit and cannot find any clear answers: My specs are as follows:

OSX 10.15.7 — (I know that I will have to upgrade to Big Sur, at least)

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)
3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7


Many thanks in advance!

[DJSpruce]

I tried the fix from OscManTor and that got it to launch, albeit very, very slowly. It took probably 5-10 mins to start up. Once started, it felt laggy but I didn't dive too far into it yet.

My CPU is a Intel i7 2600k.

It's a tough call as if I activate the license for that computer then I'm kind of stuck with it and if it is too laggy then it's basically worthless...but having to throw down $800-$1000 on a new system just to run the software that was already expensive is not an exciting prospect either.

So, as with most others on here, I am not too happy about this situation.

Will be curious to see what others report back on their experience with using the workaround before I play with it much more.

Kudos to @OscManTor though, thank you for the info!!!

[Nanoplex]

Change "hsw" (sde\sde-external-9.33.0-2024-01-07-win\misc\cpuid) according to your cpu id and ableton path, if is necessary.

Could you explain this in more detail? Thx

[[jur]]

Can someone clarify what is the easiest surefire way to check that Live 12 will run properly on their system?

Download the demo and try.

The requirements are at the bottom of this page

OSX 10.15.7 — (I know that I will have to upgrade to Big Sur, at least)

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)
3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7

The AVX2 thing is a Windows thing. As long as your mac can run Big Sur, it'll run L12.

[Eanna]

The AVX2 thing is a Windows thing. As long as your mac can run Big Sur, it'll run L12.

Can't see how it could be a Windows thing. AVX2 is an extension to the instruction set of your CPU, and not anything defined or definable in software, not without incurring the likely-massive performance penalties involved in not using microcode running on the processor to implement a performance-critical mathematic function.
This is probably what's going on with this "sde" application that @OscManTor refers to above. Even a kernel mode driver that translated AVX2 instructions as AVX1 calls would surely be slow, with function pointers to memory addresses and all that class of overhead...

I think the Big Sur thing for Apple computers is just because Big Sur won't run on pre-Gen 4 Intel CPUs. This a new concept for us Windows people! Software that depends on one hardware platform. I only know WIndows 10, and it runs really old software on really old hardware, as well as all the latest stuff. The OS software and drivers and applications on top are tailored to make use of what's available, no matter what.
To support new stuff, it must be that Windows applications are coded with the microcode equivalent of #ifdef's, so game engines like Unity etc. can make use of microcode extensions when available.
This is probably why the M1 architecture is the future for Apple. It doesn't have the legacy mode requirement.

Then again, I could be talking out my ass here. Still so bloody upset am I that my trusty "music PC" won't run Live 12. Boooo!!

[Loodis]

Same issue here. Was stoked to try version 12, but it's not happening. Installation went smoothly, said that it installed successfully. Clicked on icon to start, hourglass spins, then disappears. No reason given. What's strange is that the Ableton Push Control Panel is present in system tray, but main program won't start. So I uninstalled, restarted my computer, reinstalled. Same issue continued. I started reading these posts and checked out my system. Apparently I have a 3rd generation Intel chip:

"Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)"

I do have16 Gigs RAM.

Previous versions of Ableton ran fine on my PC.

I wasn't aware that I'd need a 5th gen CPU for running Ableton version 12, or I probably wouldn't have purchased back in November (?). I'm currently unemployed and cannot afford to buy a new CPU/Motherboard combo.

This is very frustrating indeed.

[baseinstinct]

As I think of it, it is a huge surprise after the fact to find out none of the beta testers came back here to let everyone know. Probably bound by NDA.