live 8.0.4 crash on render

[paulkeeley]

hi,

been using live 8.0.4 recently to re-inject some inspiration into the workflow. however, i'm running into a pretty consistent bug when i try to render. it seems that the first time i render, everything works fine. then, if i try to render a second time, it hangs/crashes (beachball). the sad thing is, i'm just trying to render my external synths - no other 3rd party processing is happening on any of these tracks. there are of course a couple of 3rd party plug-ins (latest versions thereof, to my knowledge) on other tracks, namely the d16 Nepheton, DUY Valve, and a Stillwell 1973 EQ, if i recall correctly. all of these have been quite rock-solid in the past.

this is insanely frustrating, and a huge buzzkill. needless to say i'm very disappointed in the quality of live8 thus far. never had such problems with previous versions of live, and i've been a user since verison 3.

rough system specs:
iMac 24" intel 2.16 core2duo
3gb ram
250gb hdd
OS 10.4.11

just from doing a quick search on these forums, i know others are experiencing crashes while rendering. has anyone out there found any solutions or workarounds?

cheers,
paul.

[paulkeeley]

just a bit more information - this issue seems to only be happening under mac OS 10.4. apparently there are no problems rendering in OS 10.5. can anyone else confirm or deny?

cheers

[cdog]

Well, I'm using 10.4.11 as well and I had this issue last night. Clients were in studio waiting for a disc. Nightmare.

Files have 10 tracks at 96k, 24bit. All seems fine during play, but then same symptoms you describe.

It doesn't matter if it's the same file, or if you open a second one. You get one render, then have to quit and re-open Live or you are straight to the beach ball.

Macbook pro
2.33 GHz Intel
4GB ram
OS 10.4.11

[cdog]

One other thing...
the crash only occurred if I was doing a mix, if all the tracks were rendered as individual files then things went fine.

[outershpongolia]

If you really needed to you could have a channel with Audio In from Master and just play the whole song and record into that track.. you'd then have a .wav of the rendered track. Not sure if this comes out the same way as rendering (probably not) but you'd still have a mixdown?

Just my amateur .02

[paulkeeley]

cdog: glad i'm not the only one, but at the same time sorry to hear you're plagued with the same issue. thanks for the confirmation.

outershpongolia: thanks for the suggestion. true, there's always the option to record to a standard track, but it's not always desirable, especially if there's a lot going on. i know that with my setup and the high strain i place upon it, i get blips here and there during playback as i like to keep latency pretty low. so, recording to a new track won't quite work unless i crank the audio buffer settings to maximum, and even then there's no guarantee of glitch-free playback.

i can understand ableton focusing their efforts on current (and future) operating systems, but i don't think tiger is a completely ancient OS just yet. but then i could be wrong - things are always a bit different here in mac-land.

can anyone else confirm or deny?

cheers

[jbodango]

hi,

been using live 8.0.4 recently to re-inject some inspiration into the workflow. however, i'm running into a pretty consistent bug when i try to render. it seems that the first time i render, everything works fine. then, if i try to render a second time, it hangs/crashes (beachball). the sad thing is, i'm just trying to render my external synths - no other 3rd party processing is happening on any of these tracks. there are of course a couple of 3rd party plug-ins (latest versions thereof, to my knowledge) on other tracks, namely the d16 Nepheton, DUY Valve, and a Stillwell 1973 EQ, if i recall correctly. all of these have been quite rock-solid in the past.

this is insanely frustrating, and a huge buzzkill. needless to say i'm very disappointed in the quality of live8 thus far. never had such problems with previous versions of live, and i've been a user since verison 3.

cheers,
paul.

Right there with you man. Very painful stuff. I have had ongling rendering issues in version 7 and version 8.

I notice that it happens in 96k frequently as well. I do try to do ALL my work in 96khz up until mastering. During test listens If I downsample directly in Ableton, the rendered output is of questionable freshness (i.e. shitty)... hence I prefer to render out to 96khz and then do the conversion Audition or whatever.

My suggestions are in bold below if you are in a hurry, but I wanted to share my pain with you.

I had a huge project a few months ago I was remixing a song that had 49 individual tracks (yeah I know overkill, but thats what the label sent.) I was traveling at the time for my consulting gig, and my little MacBookPro couldn't keep up real time, so I had to constantly freeze, flatten, consolidate, render etc to test my output and guess what? Live would crash during rendering probably 3 out of 5 times.

Anyway, to render this 5 minute song (with 49 tracks) would sometimes take 10-12 minutes. The fans on the laptop would start thrashing and the processor and hard drive would be pegged but not frozen, just cranking away. So I would get up and go smoke or masturbate or whatever and come back only to find at 98% completion Live would crash. Wash rinse repeat, you get the point.

Well this happened over and over and because I have a huge boner for this software, I refused to go use an alternate DAW. I was convinced Live could handle this massive project and IT CAN but inconsistently.

What did I do to fix my problem? I 'Invested' my money in a MacPro dual quad core with 14gb of ram. Guess what? Talk about night and day. Now I can listen back without having to constantly consolidate freeze flatten and render. That helps tons. BUT when I do render I still get occasional crashes. Luckily now I only have to wait a minute for the failwhale though.

I digress... thanks for reading... anyway....

Here's things I've noticed that (possibly) lead to (sometimes) successful rendering, which may or may not make sense. I didn't write the app, I just use it

1) clean and check your temp and cache folders. I've noticed that sometimes creating an entirely new folder on a different drive and then setting the config to the new folder can sometimes help.
2) check the folder you are going to output to. Live leaves remnants of unsuccessful renderings. If I recall correctly, when you don't manually delete these, the crashing problem compounds and happens more frequently.
3) consolidate, freeze, crop, flatten etc.
4) take a look at your .ALP file size. Sometimes saving as a copy in a entirely different project folder and collecting all samples (after you do a consolidate course) will yield different results.
5) grouping and sub bus mixing (pre version appear to be troublesome during rendering.
6) try to see if disabling the sends for a take or two helps
7) check your log file and see if any of the tracks you are loading are corrupted. i noticed that 2 in particular on my big project raised exceptions but wouldn't crash... UNTIL RENDERing

hope this helps a little.

cheers & stuff,
jda

osx 10.5.8
mac pro
2 x quad core 2.8ghz xeon
14gb ram
ableton 8.0.4
motu traveler and sometimes soundflower
traktor scratch + alesis d2
reason
battery 3

widows 2008 server
adobe audition 3.1