HeadrickProductions wrote:I did not know that you were an ableton developer....Since this is the case would you explain how the community could help fix these things as well what is ableton doing to make things better besides the things that they are suppose to do (which is have a stable product for sale). Also I would love to know from a development perspective more of the specifics that are going wrong. I can promise that I am not some other developer trying to steal idea. I just want to know, AS well all do, if this is a problem of the DAW attemtping to do to many things at once (max, bridge, VST, AU, dj ,record, etc.) Or was it simply that the beta was released early without the precautions that most other DAW take.
i'm not a developer at ableton. but i'm a developer for other software, and know how fixing bugs can be quite hard and taunting.
well, what customers can do to help ableton is to
a) report ANYTHING that doesn't behave as it should trough the official support way. that means for you as a user, you have something to call for (a support request number) and to point at if it doesn't get fixed. for ableton, it makes sure they got the problem, so it can't get missed.
b) if they request help from you: help. if you don't, chance is high they can't find the bug without it.
based on what i see so far there are different things resulting in more buggy behaviour:
- since the move to snow leopard, a lot of software shows erratic behaviour (not just live). something went wrong there from apples side.
- communication between plugins and live, as well as external devices and live, seem to cause most of the crashes. i don't use plugins, nor external devices except for a soundcard, i don't have crashes. i got a launchpad, i could find a midi-triggering crash very quickly. got fixed quickly, too. a lot had problems with native instruments massive (or was it kontakt).
problem is, when ever something external (plugin, hw) gets involved, apps have to 1) understand each other perfectly, and b) trust each other. if a plugin crashes, it's in the memory space of live. and it will crash live.
this is in short the actual issues i can see.
one thing very hard to debug are f.e. multithread related issues. they can happen extremely rare (are called race conditions), and can, depending on the os, the computer, the plugins, the amount of ram, the external devices just never happen to get triggered. for those, absolute exact details of the setup are needed.
Once again I must say that ableton is the greatest idea by far out there. The reason that WE must continue down this road is because I know what she's (ableton) capable of and it is so frustrating to pay all this money (for me ALOT) and then have so many issues. But I feel that by discussing problems in the forum, I feel that we can at least have some way to hold companies accountable. Otherwise every company who puts out a DAW would do the same thing as Ableton I mean who would not want to spend less time in a products creation (saving them on payroll and time) and they then can begin to start to gain profits even quicker. I see so many positives for ableton (except reputation) but, I do not see the positives for the consumer who they depend on so those boys can go RAGE in IBIZA
indeed, the forum is very important. but it depends just on how one behaves.
as said, the current state of live isn't as it should be. i just know sw development (esp in a nonlocked down environment) is very hard to get right. and it's hard to blame the right one for the faults, too.
a simple example of wrong-blaming: everyone knows vista sucks. right? why? because, during the first half year, it crashed very often, and very randomly, on most systems.
problem is, that crash was caused because of a very common plugin: the nvidia graphics driver. they had bugs in THERE that would trigger bluescreens. microsoft could not do anything about it. and, as you know, nvidia is a very big and common graphics solution provider for pcs (and macs now, too.. so vista would crash with those drivers on macs, too).
problem is, no one blamed nvidia, everyone blamed microsoft. and they couldn't do anything about it, and got hurt massively (they sue nvidia now, as they gave them the tools to develop a bugfree driver 2 years before vista release).
another thing that went wrong was, manufacturers put "ready for vista" on all sort of hw not compliant with the minimum specs of vista, just to be able to sell them better. the result: tons of customers got hw that just don't works well with vista. and again, they blamed vista, and not the manufacturers, who lied about the hw capabilities.
live has massive bugs right now. but i guess most of them are interoperation with the newest os versions, with drivers, with plugins. those 3 are always moving and changing targets. they would have to retest everything in every combination. not financiable. (microsoft does this by having 10s of thousands of computers as drones running 24/7 with all sort of windows releases and combinations to maybe locate some bug at some place. ableton would not have the money for that (esp. including all sort of external gear).).
