Ableton 12: Lag and Crashes with Phase Plant

[IAMDOOMED]

I got sometimes horrible lags and they can lead to crashes when I use only 1 or more instances of Phaseplant.
This happens only in Ableton 12. Bitwig, Cubase, Studio One and Reaper are working just normal.

My system:
Win 11 Pro 23H2
AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
32gb DDR 4
2080
Ableton 12.01
Komplete Audio 6
Samplerate: 48.000
Buffer: 512
All Plugins are VST3

[rm_estali]

I have the same issue.

[IAMDOOMED]

sometimes it happens with ozone imager or pro q too. is this maybe a openGL problem with ableton?

[[jur]]

Is it also happening in L11?
Did you contact Phase Plant's dev?

[IAMDOOMED]

Didnt happened in 11. Kilohearts Devs are aware but its 100% a Ableton problem. Its not only Phaseplant. It happens sometimes with the whole GUI when its on playback and you want to change something in ableton or 3rd party plugins.

[AntiPattern]

Have the same issue since 12.
Followed this thread to stay in touch and get all necessary information about this.
Did you get response from support?
PP is pretty unusable for me now.
Live freezes when I switch presets, mostly.
I tried to pinpoint any module which is responsible for this. But I can't make this 100% proof. Convolution or LFO-Table's are often in the problematic presets.
Sometimes I have to give Live some time and it will eventually become responsive again.
Most of the time I get so annoyed that I Ctrl.+Alt+Del out of Live. So the crashlogs may not really include relevant information about it.
The sound is playing in the background. Meanwhile Live is trying to do some Live stuff and the whole DAW environment becomes unresponsive.
CPU load isn't that great, either. Had it crashed with just four tracks. Worked well in 11, but something changed.
Is there any way to help the devs to pinpoint the problem.
I thought I give it some time. I mean... I could not be the only one and the devs are surely on it. Aren't they?

[[jur]]

Did anyone get in touch with Support?

[rm_estali]

Have the same issue since 12.
Followed this thread to stay in touch and get all necessary information about this.
Did you get response from support?
PP is pretty unusable for me now.
Live freezes when I switch presets, mostly.
I tried to pinpoint any module which is responsible for this. But I can't make this 100% proof. Convolution or LFO-Table's are often in the problematic presets.
Sometimes I have to give Live some time and it will eventually become responsive again.
Most of the time I get so annoyed that I Ctrl.+Alt+Del out of Live. So the crashlogs may not really include relevant information about it.
The sound is playing in the background. Meanwhile Live is trying to do some Live stuff and the whole DAW environment becomes unresponsive.
CPU load isn't that great, either. Had it crashed with just four tracks. Worked well in 11, but something changed.
Is there any way to help the devs to pinpoint the problem.
I thought I give it some time. I mean... I could not be the only one and the devs are surely on it. Aren't they?

Exactly the same story. This bug doesn't crash Ableton, just makes it unusable. I think the problem starts when I have at least 2 tracks with Phaseplant on them, and gets worse if I add more (but is not restricted to Phaseplant). I'm pretty sure this is related to GPU-rendering, because at some point I activated OpenGL on KClip3 and this triggered the problem instantly.

[intervolver]

This is happening to me too FWI. Phase Plant UI lags and gets unresponsive even though CPU use is low. Similar issues with KClip (had to stop using it). General lag spikes when opening projects that contain PP that can slow the whole system, but task manage does not report high usage of anything.

[rm_estali]

Yeah this is still happening to me too. This is terrible. I'll be starting a project and getting inspired, then at some point all my PP instances start becoming unusable even though my CPU still has plenty of room for number crunching. I don't remember this happening in Live 11, so I still have hope that the Ableton devs will correct this regression. But they've been silent.

[rm_estali]

Did anyone get in touch with Support?

I did, but no answer.

[[tca]]

Hi all!

I'm Toby, I lead one of the teams who work on Live and we are currently focusing on topics around using plugins in Live. I wanted to let you all know that we are aware that you are having issues and we want to see what can be done to resolve them. The first thing for me to do is to try and reproduce the problem, and in order for me to do that it would help if you could provide detailed steps to reproduce, as well as details about your system configuration. Thanks!

[rm_estali]

Hi Toby,

I am on Windows 10, Intel i7-7820HQ, Nvidia Quadro M1200, 16GB RAM.

This bug is hard to catch. To reproduce it, I think you need to have a fairly resource-hungry project going (but not necessarily super heavy, I've had lags even at 30% CPU usage). In this setting, some plugins, most notably PhasePlant, will start lagging and even freeze the entire UI at some point (including Ableton UI). One way I've encountered that completely blocked the DAW was to have multiple instances of Phaseplant, then load one instance of Kazrog KClip3 and activate OpenGL in it.

Hope this can help, thanks for working on this !

[nednerb]

Hi Toby,

I've reported a few of these crashes after Force Quits.

I've seen these issues on my Intel Mac running Sonoma, where I have long running recording sets, where I am also automating lots of parameters. There is MIDI, audio, lots of routing, but I seem safe for CPU, mostly.

I can resonate with other comments that the issues seem to be graphics related. However, I also notice that when I am very careful about clicking once, and waiting for the UI to fully update, I have a better chance at not causing the freeze.

But at some point, I might click the wrong knob or a device header, release the mouse, move to a new control fast, try to automate it, and the UI will lock for Ableton. I will know in my gut first when the new control isn't "grabbed" by the mouse cursor, and I then get a rainbow wheel that doesn't stop a second later.

Strangely, I will still be able to hear the audio go on. On my Push 2 I can navigate the devices of my set and change the Record Arm button to red or inactive.

Processor: 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9
Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB
Memory: 128 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
macOS: 14.7.1
Interface: RME Babyface Pro FS

[dman1977]

Funny, my system does a very similar thing with Minimal Audio Current. Or it did up until the most recent update (last checked on 12.1.0).. I have not checked with 12.1.1.

In my case, everything worked fine in the plugin until I hit the Matrix button to see all mappings, when the play head was playing. Once I did that, it locked the plugin and Ableton up - yet music would still be playing in the background. Or if it wasn't locked up, it was in ultra slow/no response mode. The fix - in Windows 10 - shut the audio interface off, and then restart it. That worked most of the time. If it didn't, force quitting Ableton (and losing progress) was the solution.

I have licenses in Reaper, Cubase, and Bitwig as well - and none seem to have this issue, leaving me to believe it is an Ableton issue, albeit minor for me.