FIX YOUR SHIT ABLETON! Totally FED UP!!

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 1:33 pm

i dont think it sounds as good....it sounds kind of hollow, whereas the rendering has a little more depth. Nothing to do with normalisation, by the way as most of the time i dont use it.

it just sounds different to me, not-as-good different. And its something I'm reluctant to try.

i've been having probs rendering stuff with beat-repeat on the master track, also i've been having probs where live experiences a serious program error alot recently, when I'm closing a set.

to 'workaround' (spit - i hate that word) the beat repeat problem I render the track, open a new set put the rendered track in there and then beatrepeat it.....but still, thats awkward and can consume time. I'm waiting to do some more tests to isolate the problem before I post a new thread.

also, like some others mentioned , I dont tell my fellow musicians/dj friends in the real world how great live is any more. Whereas before I kept heaping praise, finding its ideal use for each of my friends. even if they had an established setup I would always convince them its a great sketchpad.

but not anymore, I'm afraid to say. I feel conned into buying and testing a beta, and I'm miffed about the fanboys (who are looking for a moderator role on this forum probably) who harp in and say everythings fine. Point being everything ISNT fine if its not working unilaterally and as its been advertised to function. Especially speaking for the non-newbies, who maintain and tweak their machines for audio and have isolated the problem as a software one, from using earlier versions of live.

also, I too have noticed that after installing live 5.03 it seemingly corrupted the other versions I have, causing the hideous audio glitches. which thankfully have seemingly stopped now, since I've not been using older sets and used the latest maudio drivers.

another thing I still have some residual bitterness about is how the whole 'on the fly looping' issue was handled. That, for me, is a fundamental function of live and how I use it mostly when I have no ideas in my head and just want to feel something out. What I got for the meticulous reporting of that bug was 'it works fine here' ....and was not resolved for fucking -ages- , and when it was eventually more problems came with it. such as awful sound.

so as unhelpful as ranting without posting specifics is, fanboys saying theirs is fine is equally unhelpful and all the more infuriating and in no way a justifaction...or perhaps, in no way absolves ableton of responsibility to make their product work as it should.

honestly, the phrases 'workaround' and 'it works fine here' ....make me sick, cause my deudinal ulcer to enflame, gives me a migraine and really pisses me off. I'm a simple lab rat tho, thats all, just a simple lab rat with simple values. However, I'm making an effort to not go insane on the forums anymore, and no matter how much it might disgust me, I will try to meticulously note all parameters and variables when reporting problems (ala beta testing) .......also, like someone previously posted....I have other things to take my mind off live5 (praise be to allah) otherwise I'd still be fairly bitter about the product thus far. Its all about paying for a beta product, thats the main thing. that is. so. a. noying.

hambone1 · Post by **hambone1** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:23 pm

radeon wrote:
hambone1 wrote:
My setup is nothing more than a standard G5 and a Yamaha 01V. It doesn't crash. The only time it did is when I was experimenting with third-party plug-ins.
Ok from what you say and other postings I imagining you DJ only? would i be ok in my reasoning? and you dont use any vst only live fx. This has really easy thing for live to do. to only play audio stereo song files and only use live fx. I thinking that is why a lot of peoples are not finding bugs and everything is ok. It is when the user of live use live as a full daw system with vst and writing song the problems show.

Yep, I DJ only. I often have 6 stereo tracks and loops running at the same time to the front and rear of the room, as well as live Impulse percussion, FX, click track and 20 MIDI tracks (CC controls for lighting, video, auto crossfades, send levels, etc, and video and lighting chords), which play another 48 MIDI tracks (lighting clips and visualizer) on a synched iBook. It all works perfectly. It has to. My job depends on it. If it couldn't do all of that, I'd reduce the load until it could. I never let the CPU meter rise above 30%.

IMHO, it's called Live for a reason. It's a performance instrument, not a full-featured DAW. It probably will be one day, though. I agree with the philosophy of many here who think it was released before its time. That's not everyone, though. 5.0.0 worked out of the box for me, and 5.0.3 is even sweeter. I think you'll find many who have given up their old-school DAWs and work exclusively on Live.

Should I feel guilty because it works for me? Sorry, I don't. Yes, I'd like to push it to do more, and when I can (Macintel towers & Universal Binary!), I will. Until then, I work within the constraints of the current system.

Call me 'fanboy' if you like. I don't really care. It works great for me, and I do wish it worked as well for everyone else.

mr-e · Post by **mr-e** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:42 pm

I don't want to sound as a smartass , and I'm well aware that this explanation/generalisation will probably not apply to you and is more of a rant than anything else but:

Ableton 5.x never crashed on me. From time to time it seemed that it was hanging/crashing , but from years of computer experience I was always quickly able to find another source for the problem : a problem I could solve after which ableton continued flawlesly without restarting the app or rebooting the pc.
Imo ableton runs so time critical that once an other problem occurs on your system , ableton almost blocks immidiatly or goes into slow-motion mode. If you start smashing the keyboard and the mouse at that moment , you'll crash ableton , if you have patience or fix the problem at hand , ableton will contiue to work.
Maybe cleaning up your system , updating drivers and uninstalling everything that doesn't have to do with ableton might help .. if that's a choice you can afford , I run ableton on my laptop from work so I have dozens of backup processes slowing my system down.

Also realise that if you're the kind of guy that formats his harddisk or reinstalls windows just because he has a virus and doesn't know how to remove it with jost google and without any virusscanner in under 15 minutes , you really don't know what's going on in your PC. (this is the smartass bit

)

Also , without accusing anyone of illegal activities : I have to admit that before ableton 4/5 , I have used some cracked versions of ableton , and those were buggy as hell --> bought the real deal and all of my problems were over.

All this doesn't mean the ableton's should try to tweak their app a little more so it will be more forgiving on machines that aren't dedicated to audio , but imo Propellerheads Reason and the old fruityloops were the only apps ever to achieve that kind of performance and propellerheads f*cked that up in 3.0 too.

I guess all I'm saying is that I'm quite forgiving towards the abelton people for creating a heavyweight app for the lightweight market.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 5:49 pm

henry ford wrote:
djsynchro wrote:Why didn't you resample the set to an audio track? Recording a track takes a tiny amount of CPU if everything plays well that's the best workaround for now.
i'm not a fan of this method...i dont think it sounds the same as rendering.

You should render a small test arrangement & also record it in a track with resampling & mix or add them together with one file phase reversed. I bet you they will cancel out completely (meaning they are identical). You have to make sure the two files are aligned exactly and are playing at the same level of course but that's easy to accomplish in Live. Also the test arrangent should have only audio files because vsts sometimes have things like free running oscillators, and then your two tracks would not be identical.

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:02 pm

djsynchro wrote:
henry ford wrote:
djsynchro wrote:Why didn't you resample the set to an audio track? Recording a track takes a tiny amount of CPU if everything plays well that's the best workaround for now.
i'm not a fan of this method...i dont think it sounds the same as rendering.
You should render a small piece, record a small piece with resampling & mix or add them together with one file phase reversed. I bet you they will cancel out completely (meaning they are identical). You have to make sure the two files are aligned exactly and are playing at the same level of course but that's easy to accomplish in Live.

not if he's using efects that will be in different states or have random parameters.

that said, yeah, there isn't a difference between rendered and recorded audio files. At least for me.

Nice to hear that i'm not crazy and there are some other people here who don't have problems with L5. I really believe that people who are reporting these problems have issues with either their audio interface or 3rd party VST's. (or unrealistic cpu power expectations) Again, I'm not saying that isn't ableton's problem, but i am saying that the software itself isn't intrinsically buggy.

.lm.

loveslap · Post by **loveslap** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 8:18 pm

peeddrroo wrote:yes, as supster says: create a new audio track, set it to "resample" and start recording.
it's not the easiest way to render, agreed, but it works, you'll have your project without cracks and pops.

as for the stability/performance, it works well here: spending up to 8 hours a day on it every single day, and i seldom have a crash.
maybe you should question your system or check the plugins you're using (maybe you can drop a list here, that could help).
i understand you must be frustrated, but look how many ppl here seem to use Live without problems. maybe the problem is not ableton's.

and maybe if you changed each f*** you use in your initial post with a plugin you're using, you'd get more help...

sure but i gota the same pile of plugins NOT crashing my protools or my logic

just live has all the drama

ableton : do the world a favor and hire away a few programmers from apple and digi

and please.. give us the options of saving to a previous release #
the schema of your underlying song documents shouldn't be changing so radically from subversion to subversion

and older version of the software ought to be able to open some of a newer version songfile.. whatever it can understand

oh and put it out for the playstation

oh and send me some valium

----

i'll settle for any 2 of these requests

charles, loveslap

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 1:51 am

I built my PC myself, read all the geek, gamer & overclocker boards for a good motherboard, flashed the BIOS with the latest firmware update, latest drivers for everything... checked that the RAM was on the MOBO manufaturer's list... you get the picture. It's not connected to the Internet with XP running the minimum of services.

And yes, I get really good performance, I crash very very rarely and that's usually because of a couple of donationware beta VSTs that I have that are so good that I'm willing to sacrifice a little stability for it.
Does Live run stable for me? Absolutely.

The moving clips slowness is irritating, though to be fair I have to say the speed at which a LiveClip previews from the browser playing a VST with its setttings and all effects is bloody amazing not to mention an incredible timesaver as well as a creative tool. Anyway, Ableton have said that improving response time of Live has a high priority.

I have been in a lot of studios and if things are not working it is almost always the same thing: People have no clue, they're too lazy to really read the manuals, don't know the theory, don't do the research and so don't know what they're doing and then they have problems getting things to work properly.

There always have been, always will be, technicalities involved getting studios up and running, there will always be problems that need solving.
You HAVE to read everything you need to read and you don't have to be a programmer but you HAVE to be good with computers if you want to do this.

And Live is the best piece of music making kit I have ever owned. Period!

supster · Post by **supster** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 3:02 am

djsynchro wrote:I built my PC myself, read all the geek, gamer & overclocker boards for a good motherboard, flashed the BIOS with the latest firmware update, latest drivers for everything... checked that the RAM was on the MOBO manufaturer's list... you get the picture. It's not connected to the Internet with XP running the minimum of services.

you shouldnt have to be an engineer to get something to work within rasonable expectations having reasonable technical ability.

you dont have to nearly the same degree with cubase or protools. why is that? people are reporting this over and over again, its the same thing with so many people.

to a degree you do, sure. theyre not without thier incompatibility or problems. i own cubase, i know .. ive heard about some of the issues with PT 7 so none of this is any picnic. but ...

you normally dont have to strip everything out, be a tech nerd following every little detail of every factor of all of your gear on boards, and be an expert at build your own shit from the ground up.

and you know what? if that is the case, if thats what we have to do in order to get this to do what it claims to do within reasonable expectations ..

then somebody needs to start publishing more detailed guidance on what works and what doesnt, compatible hardware and software, known incompatibilities and issues updated on a regular basis, detailed guidelines on optimization (other than "set your buffer size" guides.

i mean, this would only be fair to the people that are desperately hunting around for solutions to problems so they can just write music without wasting countless hours and throwing money at changing and upgrading everything trying to get back to doing that.

since your such an expert and so happy, why dont you use some of that good will and positive energy to start the unofficial PC users ableton gear guide. i mean that.

truth:

ableton is not doing anything even close to that. nor is m-audio or any of the other companies in the chain of whoever is getting this product to market

theres no list (other than a dead sticky thread at the top of this forum about VST incompatibilities during beta ... one of them is for version 4) .. theres, no official hardware/sofware FAQ, no seachable database, not even any real official or unofficial statements or guidlines about any of this other than the few bits that are in the manual

the extent of interaction on the board with the dedicated user base is basically one guy.

please see the reality of that - regardless of the fact that we know others are reading this and they are doing something over there, we have NO CLUE what it is most of the time because they are very good at stonewalling us for what are (of course) very good business reasons from someones angle

from the angle of the people that things are NOT working for, this policy is debatable ..

but so far theyre not, were getting almost nothing from them. so, we need some motivated expert to start compiling some working guidelines on all this,

because it looks like its not going to be them. you seem like the perfect guy
.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 3:18 am

I've got to admit, I love this program, but it does seem to become less and less stable as the years roll on. Live 1 and 2 were hands down the most solid applications I've ever used. They would handle every weird thing you did to them no matter what. Plug-ins, hardware, everything. Not a single crash, ever.

With Live 3, I had a few crashes, but nothing really enough to shake my confidence in the program. However, Live 4 seemed to crash all the time, and the vast majority of the crashes didn't seem to be reproducable. I haven't had Live 5 long, but it's still crashed on me a couple of times.

To be fair, I haven't spent enough time with the latest version to pass judgement, but a crash is a crash. My confidence in this program for live applications has been shaken, and since that's what this was originally meant to do, that's kind of a big deal. I felt totally comfortable playing out with v1 and 2, and even 3, but I've seen 4 and 5 disappear too many times to have faith that it won't happen on stage.

I think stability is job one, even over features. Maybe not in the studio, but definitely if the product is intended for live performance. Stability was one of the reasons that I fell in love with Live to begin with, but that seems to be eroding a little bit every time I'm unexpectedly staring at my desktop.

k

supster · Post by **supster** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 3:31 am

one more thing (that deserves its own post):

why is it that - in the computer industry - more so than any other - its ALWAYS on the backs of the users to constantly fight to show its not thier problem

if you have a problem with your car, and it wont start, most people dont assume you arent out of gas. theres a mechanical problem that needs to be fixed, you bring it in, they diagnose it, and they fix it

you dont have to log onto an anoymous board, and argue with the company ... and then have other people .. whose cars do start, and assume you are deficient because yours doesnt ... come into your thread and write glowing testimonials about the car and threads you started because your out 70 grand and BMW cant figure out what the problem is

you dont hear people say "well have you swapped out the engine yet?? because i built mine from the ground up using custom hand built parts" or "well obviously your driving with passengers in your car, thats your problem ... you really shouldnt have anybody else in there"

software/hardware interactions get so complex, and there are so many vendors involved, that everybody gets Pass the Buck Syndrome.

Its Not Us - Its the User ... or .. Its Not Us - Its Those Other Guys

and the biggest irony?:

sofware/hardware vendors are full of IT people that are going through the same exact thing with OTHER companies every day.

at the same time they are reading these posts and figuring out why its not thier problem ... they are typing thier OWN POST out on another board about some buggy shit coding software or with Microsoft about why the server just quit or some game that they are playing at lunch with everybody in the office WONT RECOGNIZE THE FUCKING LOGITECH MINI MOUSE CONTROLLER GODAMMIT

its all such a big game, it such a pain in the ass to come on here and try and state your case over and over to get some results

and ya'll can sympathize becuase in some other area you are going thru the SAME EXACT THING with somebody else

so STFU

note: ok i know, BMW is a bad example ... you probably do go thru the same thing

loveslap · Post by **loveslap** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 3:43 am

dirtystudios wrote:I've got to admit, I love this program, but it does seem to become less and less stable as the years roll on. Live 1 and 2 were hands down the most solid applications I've ever used. They would handle every weird thing you did to them no matter what. Plug-ins, hardware, everything. Not a single crash, ever.

With Live 3, I had a few crashes, but nothing really enough to shake my confidence in the program. However, Live 4 seemed to crash all the time, and the vast majority of the crashes didn't seem to be reproducable. I haven't had Live 5 long, but it's still crashed on me a couple of times.

To be fair, I haven't spent enough time with the latest version to pass judgement, but a crash is a crash. My confidence in this program for live applications has been shaken, and since that's what this was originally meant to do, that's kind of a big deal. I felt totally comfortable playing out with v1 and 2, and even 3, but I've seen 4 and 5 disappear too many times to have faith that it won't happen on stage.

I think stability is job one, even over features. Maybe not in the studio, but definitely if the product is intended for live performance. Stability was one of the reasons that I fell in love with Live to begin with, but that seems to be eroding a little bit every time I'm unexpectedly staring at my desktop.

k

yeah i love it too.. despite crashing my box 5 times a day its always the first thing i launch when starting a new project

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 4:31 am

dirtystudios wrote: My confidence in this program for live applications has been shaken, and since that's what this was originally meant to do, that's kind of a big deal.

Heh, its kind of ironic cos hambone said something to the effect that its intended for live use, hence the name, and suggesting its stable for live use (i agree with everything but the stable part). Tho in fairness, he's just playing back samples (via lives tools) and spittin midi , plus hes not using an maudio interface. But I agree with you dirtystudios, i use vsts. and Im not pushin boats here, I dont trust live5 and am not confident it wont make a fool of me on stage, yet.

I'd just like to point out, possibly for the twentieth time since i started posting over six months ago, that live5 is sold as a daw, sold as a vst host, sold as an on-the-fly production device.... and I think they are obliged by law, if not common courtesy, to ensure that is what we have.
for the sake of my own sanity and inner peace, I have given up on the 'and in a timely fashion' pipe dream

supster raises some excellent points that I believe I've mentioned on other threads before, but have failed to put across as eleoquently of late.

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 4:37 am

all I will add is this: the latest driver for the maudio firewire410 apparently doesn't allow you to record midi correctly in the least. so I mentioned it here in the bugs and alex quickly got back to me saying that the latest firewire410 driver basically did something weird and that maudio are aware of the problem and are working on it. it's a known issue by ableton and maudio. so thats cool and all... but why the f*** isn't this mentioned in a sticky or something so people like me know? I thought updating all your drivers was the way to go? apparently not in the firewire410 case...

henry ford · Post by **henry ford** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 4:44 am

oh my fucking god. I was having some probs with my midi controller earlier on, suddenly I couldnt get it to attach itself to a quadfromaghe paramater as it usually does. by using the setup in quad, selecting autobind, using the mouse to select or move the parameter, then tweaking the midi controller. Its always been golden, until tonight....and the last thing ive done was update the driver. Was too tired to be confident I wasnt missing something so decided I;d sleep on it.
edit: i noticed on the thread "recording bug" alex mention it was a prob with osx , perhaps this is an unrelated issue. I think tomorro I'm going to go through live 5.03 and do some tests and report with some useful detail.

these maudio issues HAVE TO BE stickied in the forum like you say, Id go so far as to say even emailed. they're promoting each other....oh wait a minute, theres me acting like a simple fool again.

i must recite my mantra,

common sense is wrong
common sense is wrong
zim zim zoo
zim zim zoo

there, i feel better already!

kechambe · Post by **kechambe** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 7:11 am

I have to say that the stability of Live is really freaking me out too.

I have a brand new PowerBook 17in with 2GB of RAM, etc. I bought this one cause Live was crashing on the one my company bought me for work. I won't connect it to the internet or install ANY software on it because Live is so sketchy. When I got it I reinstalled OSX and de-selected everything. Since then I have installed nothing but Live and the RME Hammerfall DSP software. So this PowerBook It's as pure as it gets. Sadly, stability has not improved.

Oh any my Multiface -- I bought that cause my FireWire 410 would just stop playing audio from 5 seconds randomly. But at least that doesn't happen anymore but now I wonder if it was an Ableton bug.

I'm working on the design for a new club and I was demo-ing Ableton to a few investors. Live 5.03 on OSX 10.4.3 crashed when I went to an _Ableton_ plug-in. I didn't even have my MIDI controller hooked up. It’s done this to me 20-30 times. Way too often.

I have a show in a month and I'm praying there is another stability release before then. Otherwise I'll have to run through my entire set a couple time to make sure I don't get any crashes. The last thing I would do in front of a crowd is be spontaneous with Live.

I really wonder how the pros do it. Has Sasha or PVD had crashes in public?

Please keep me and my PowerBook in your prayers...

Keith