Ableton Forum

Look, I bought this program to record audio. wtf else do i need tell you?? I'm using the program for what its intended for.

Or am i mistaken?? Is this program not meant to record 15 sequenced tracks from reason and 10 external live tracks from microphones??

I mean, lets get real here... I paid 500 bucks for this program and as time goes on it just gets worse and worse. I thought.. ok... ill wait out these horrible problems in hope that it will get fixed in an update. Well, 2 updates later. Its getting worse.. And reverting back to a older version isnt much use because it happens in there too.

I recorded one of my songs into sonar 5 last night. THE EXACT same way i did in Ableton. Used the same effects on each track like i had in Ableton. AND it fucking worked for once!! Imagine that?? A fuckin audio track playing back without dropouts and clicks and pops. Not too mention the NO pops and clicks in my song renders.. so beautiful

So, i have no need to send bug reports to Ableton. I'm not using this program anymore. I'm sorry to say but these guys are rookies and writing software. I'm not denying the fact they may be "revolutionary rookies".. but they are rookies when this shit goes on and on update after update.

So thats my story.. Yeah i was pissed when i started this thread and needed to vent. But that tends to happen when you buy a program to do whats its intended to do and it doesn't work. Like i said... I spent countless hours working on something that had to go out on a professional CD and the god damn thing wouldn't render to save my life. It was a track with 24 tracks with various compressors and verbs and delay. Nothing special.
Sequenced tracks from reason and some soft synths and vocal tracks. No crazy warping or automation or anything really. Just a basic audio track.

So i decided to give Ableton the flying finger and record it in Sonar and mix it down with my limited knowledge of the program and it WORKED GREAT!!

Until this software is properly released, i wont be using it anymore.. Its just bullshit i cant deal with anymore..

supster wrote:

hambone1 wrote:Most dark clouds do have a silver lining, if you look hard enough.

well, then help me find the silver lining in these:

1 - very badly underperforming arrangeview at low resource usage. leads to lockups, "white screen of death" and occasional crashes.

2 - session view duplicating scenes parallels the arrange view problem. copy and paste parallels the arrange view slowdowns, although not quite to the same degree

3 - Live clips function efffectively useless, as its performance parallels the arrange view problem. as the lockups and waits increase on arrangeview, almost any Live clip task can lock up Live from anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 / 3 minutes - just like clips in the arrange view

4 - underperforming VSTs in comparison to other hosts, have never been able to simulataneously run more than 2 or 3 maximum (various combos of
atmosphere, trilogy, reaktor, guru, microtonic, z3ta, minimonsta, pro-53, absynth 3) and usually can only run 1 at most (probably a rompler like atmosphere)

5 - audio glitching issue, documented elsewhere. although im lucky, i only experience this under certain conditions, and because i have given up on using live as an arrangement app i dont get them anymore

6 - CTRL-SHFT-I duplicate scenes shorcut, does not work. started intermittently quitting in version 4 now never works in 5

7 - mousewheel, randomely quits. does not work much more often than it doesn

8 - VST windows, will randomly not appear. ie. clicking on the plug window button, nothing happens - VST is not accidentlally pushed off the screen. have to delete the entire VST and re-add (thereby losing any presets you were working on if you hadnt saved them

9 - render issues (that i am not having, luckily)

10- extermely slow loadtimes on sets with anything more than a few audio channels. "White Screen of Death" on this and other tasks

--

.

see, this is more productive. I still don't understand why these things don't happen to me, but supster is talking about specifics.

I use live clips with vst instruments (and of course combos of fx sometimes) all the time (because it's the easiest way to deal with presets) and never have a problem.

I use shift-apple-I RELIGIOUSLY and don't have problems.

Load time is slower than live 4 for me, but not horribly and i have not had a crash on load since the betas...

I don't use a lot of VST or AU instruments tho. Well, that's not true, i do use them a lot, but i tend to bounce or render (with no problems) them to audio because i need all the CPU i can get with my slow ass pb laptop.

And as far as live being underpowered with using vsts/aus etc, i don't realy think that's a bug, i think that's just how it is right now, hopefully it will improve. (i don't mind if it doesn't, i'm fine with what i can do now, and will hopefully have a faster computer relatively soon)

so is the issue maybe about 3rd party plugins? (still ableton should make their software support them as best as they can, so i'm not saying it isn't their problem) Have you tried running sets that give you problems without 3rd party plugins? try isolating to figure out which ones are screwing things up so ableton can fix their support??

Is the issue about audio interface? Have you tried running live with just your built in audio? Does that improve the situation?



What is it?

Because it's not just the software itself, i assure you that it works well within expectations for me. so what's up?


.lm.

supster wrote: 1 - very badly underperforming arrangeview at low resource usage. leads to lockups, "white screen of death" and occasional crashes.

2 - session view duplicating scenes parallels the arrange view problem. copy and paste parallels the arrange view slowdowns, although not quite to the same degree

3 - Live clips function efffectively useless, as its performance parallels the arrange view problem. as the lockups and waits increase on arrangeview, almost any Live clip task can lock up Live from anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 / 3 minutes - just like clips in the arrange view

4 - underperforming VSTs in comparison to other hosts, have never been able to simulataneously run more than 2 or 3 maximum (various combos of
atmosphere, trilogy, reaktor, guru, microtonic, z3ta, minimonsta, pro-53, absynth

3) and usually can only run 1 at most (probably a rompler like atmosphere)

5 - audio glitching issue, documented elsewhere. although im lucky, i only experience this under certain conditions, and because i have given up on using live as an arrangement app i dont get them anymore.

6 - CTRL-SHFT-I duplicate scenes shorcut, does not work.

10- extermely slow loadtimes on sets with anything more than a few audio channels. "White Screen of Death" on this and other tasks

To some degree or another I have experienced these problems. I am running an early generation dual 2g G5, one gig of ram, 250gb hardrive, 20 gig remaining on the disk. I experienced the same problems when I had 70 or so gigs left. I am a visual artist, and I have many large images as well as audio files. My drivers are maintained on a regular basis. To some extent I had attributed all of the problems to the number of items on my computer. The problem is that I did not experience these problems at all in 4 (with the exception of the random loss of ability to cut and paste.)

I am concerned because there are a number of us who are experiencing problems in 5 that have not experienced them in four. Apparently there is something wrong with our equipment, files, or Live's coding/compatability. Rather than whine, I would like to ask if perhaps there was a way to inform us of the products that you feel are the most compatable, or at least outline some common workarounds. My logic is the following:

Although this community is blessed with some particularly capable, creative minds, and this has helped troubleshoot several problems, it is in the interest of your company not only many maintain the user base, but also present a product that is reliable, and idiot proof, like it used to be. I can be a complete moron a lot of the time, but between the industrial organizational of both osx and live, I had virtually no problems, other than running out of cpu with quality instruments like Operator, for about a year. All of this has changed.

Perhaps there could be a sticy of details for which to troubleshoot in the future? Maybe even a blacklist of products that have repeatedly caused customer complaints? I wish I had resolution on this whole maudio thing, but none of us will ever know for sure if it is their drivers or not, especially since you all have an alliance. That situation of course is not your fault, as it seems to e more of an unfortunate turn of event. Perhaps there is a advertising quality to m-audio products that appeals to neanderthals like myself.

Anyway, if this was made available, I promise to laminate it and velcro it to my powermac.

I can not determine how much my decline in making music with live is attributed to a lack of time or the performance decrease I have been experiencing. As I have stated earlier in this thread, I had a tremendously positive experience recording with Live yesterday, with all sorts of things goin on that only Live could make possible. $ hours with no glitching. No digital distortion at all. Live drums, live horns, loud vocals, a range of vocals, and guitar amps instead of monitors. Still no problems at all. We used a presonus firebox and and a 12 inch current build 1.5g powerbook ( I may have accidently said 15" earlier-my bad.) This makes me optimistic about returning to use live as my main application once there are more powerful computers availbale to enable me to use live the way I want to use it, and/or all of these mood-killing performance issues are settled. In the meantime I use it once a week for an ongoing project, and monitor this forum try to stay current with the ceaseless number of ingenutive ideas.

xl5 wrote: "Very well put. In fact trade the word Cubase for Logic Pro and it's no longer your story but mine."

As much as I hate supplementing my favorite app (live) with such a substandard hodge-podge of unreliable, yet powerful tools (logic pro 7,) I too find myself in this boat.

supster wrote:

peeddrroo wrote: 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.

i think it needs to be pointed out again:

the people that are not experiencing the bad performance issues are very quick immediately defend ableton and throw the ball back at the people who are either trying to get them fixed or giving up in total frustration

its a matter of selective perception, because you are happy that its all working within reasonable expectations so you assume everybody who is not getting good results must be doing something wrong.

this is not always the case, if you were having any of these showstopping, very common problems you suddenly be a lot more aware of the sheer amount of people reporting the same or similar symptoms acrost all sorts of hardware/software setups

its a lot of people, reporting very bad problems. and if the solutions were obvious, answers would have been given out or ableton would have fixed them by now
.

I have to agree, I have much pleasure using live, but I know the in the real world.........these computers have BUGS! And they should be addressed with diligence.

Plus, to me anyway, it seems like we are going BACKWARDS in fix problems.......not forward. 4 better than 5, 5 better than 5.0.1......etc

Especially 5.0.3. seems to have those with problems at a FEVER!

supster wrote:

hambone1 wrote:Most dark clouds do have a silver lining, if you look hard enough.

well, then help me find the silver lining in these:

1 - very badly underperforming arrangeview at low resource usage. leads to lockups, "white screen of death" and occasional crashes.

2 - session view duplicating scenes parallels the arrange view problem. copy and paste parallels the arrange view slowdowns, although not quite to the same degree

3 - Live clips function efffectively useless, as its performance parallels the arrange view problem. as the lockups and waits increase on arrangeview, almost any Live clip task can lock up Live from anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 / 3 minutes - just like clips in the arrange view

4 - underperforming VSTs in comparison to other hosts, have never been able to simulataneously run more than 2 or 3 maximum (various combos of
atmosphere, trilogy, reaktor, guru, microtonic, z3ta, minimonsta, pro-53, absynth 3) and usually can only run 1 at most (probably a rompler like atmosphere)

5 - audio glitching issue, documented elsewhere. although im lucky, i only experience this under certain conditions, and because i have given up on using live as an arrangement app i dont get them anymore

6 - CTRL-SHFT-I duplicate scenes shorcut, does not work. started intermittently quitting in version 4 now never works in 5

7 - mousewheel, randomely quits. does not work much more often than it doesn

8 - VST windows, will randomly not appear. ie. clicking on the plug window button, nothing happens - VST is not accidentlally pushed off the screen. have to delete the entire VST and re-add (thereby losing any presets you were working on if you hadnt saved them

9 - render issues (that i am not having, luckily)

10- extermely slow loadtimes on sets with anything more than a few audio channels. "White Screen of Death" on this and other tasks

--

all of these have been reported, most by multiple people, and i dont have the time to try and justify why we believe they are abletons problem to fix as the vendor and not ours as the user. its been done elsewhere.

some people are on substadard gear, or have buffers too low, or not enough memory, or have unrealistic espectations (10 VST synths running at once etc) or do not upgrade thier drivers, do not follow the board to pick up on solutions, etc

but many of us, no: we have tried everything. BEYOND everything. they are bugs or broken features. for sure.

its so bad that i feel exactly like the guy who started this thread, all the time. or ... i did, until i finally decided i cant use this program for other than certain tasks, and leave the arrangment and VSTs to another one (SX3)

which wastes a lot of my time i devoted to learning Live tequniqes - months and months, dont want to think tioo hard about it ... and slows down progress on projects i have almost complete and people are waiting for. in some cases release schedules

actually i know there are a couple of bugs or broken features that im not mentioning because ive been "working around" them for so long im not always consious of them unless im trying to do the task and they come up. i'll come back and add them later

hambone if you have any miracle solutions please give them. ableton doesnt need people always telling them how awesome they are, although its nice to have postive warm fuzzy feedback from the fans, if they dont hear why thier product isnt working for a hi enough percentage of users the company will go under ..

also, if you want to donate your perfectly performing rig for the benefit of the community, please donate it for autopsy so abelton can dissect why you seem to have none of these problems or any others, but a whole lot of other people do.
.

The only issue from your list I have is the inability to duplicate scenes - no biggie. It's been reported to Ableton, they're working on it. However, I don't use third-party plug-ins, which IMO is the source of many issues. I agree that if they work in other hosts, they should work in Live, too. If I had those issues, I'd feel your frustration, too.

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.

This isn't a hobby for me. I left my job 9 months ago and started a business based around Live. For me, it does all I need and more. If that's 'fanboyism', so be it. I don't really care.

If I have a bug/issue/problem to report to Ableton, I'll do it.

I also think we get a distorted view on the forum. Everyone speaks up with problems, which is great, but very few post how well everything works. IMO, it's the minority with problems. I know that's no consolation to those with problems, but it does put things into perspective.

Didn't mean to start a pissing contest here. We're all in this together.

Bone

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.

here is part of the problem i believe, because i get the impression that people that are not experiencing many problems are using Live self contained as an audio only performance app. And/or using mainly the built in MIDI instrument or possibly routing MIDI to external stuff.

the people that are experiencing the most problems are using it as a production application, comprehensive sound design and DAW environment.
which means trying to intergrate it with a lot of 3rd party stuff.

i cant do without my plugs and use Live for my primary purpose, i need the plugins. if i cant use the plugs, i can still use it the way you do as a DJ/performance app, but thats not my main focus right now.

This isn't a hobby for me. I left my job 9 months ago and started a business based around Live.

i know, you're doing some pretty rad stuff apparently which is very cool.

I also think we get a distorted view on the forum.

of course we do, everything is distorted: the extent of problems, who has what, what theyre running, what factors are involved, even who the people are and thier personalities. its online, its wierd like that. but i do think after youve been on enough boards and dealt with people remotely like this you get a sense of whats going on if you pay attention.

my impression is - and of course im somewhat biased because ive been banging my head against the wall with this for long enough - but -

i have noticed there are less and less people saying "omg, thank you so much! its all so smooth and im doing amazing stuff, this rocks!" the way they used to be, and there are way more threads that start like this one (ahh .. maybe not so over the top ) but ..

the people that are complaining are complaining about the same things over and over again, update after update. its also brand new people with one or two posts that go out of thier way to find the board (which is not so obvious to find from the main link, i need to add) and they are reporting the same problems the regulars are.

many of them are running competing products using the same exact gear for the same tasks, and have enough horsepower and tech savvy to set it all up, and would rather use live because its so unique. and they are running into these same issues.

these are all good indicator that there is something really wrong; that its not just isolated people or just whiners that dont know what the f*ck they are doing.

also:

the people that report on a board like this are in the minority of total users. for every person like me or a couple others who have been persistanty participating, reporting and typing shit out ...

there are X number of others out there. hundreds? maybe thousands that experience the same exact things and never report them because they are not in the habit of doing so, or they are shy to, not used to boards, lazy, bad spellers, ashamed of grammer, dont know about the forum, dont type fast enough to type a post like this out in less that five minutes the way we do .. etc etc etc

or they are just consumers who buy a product and expect it to work, and if it doesnt they might write a single email and if they dont get any reply that fixes it asap they write the product off and stop using it ..
\
also, they bitch to all thier friends and collegues in thier industry of choice about how they feel ripped off by the product, which is how a lot of people make thier choices about what to buy and not buy.

so .. having been on enough tech boards and seeing this kind of thing over the years with different software ... if i worked for ableton i would be very concerned right now with the signals coming off this board.

its not ordinary "ok there are a few problems, but the majority of people are ok" that you always get with any software thats released these days.

its a lot worse than that. again, based on my personal experience with these kinds of situations.
.

supster wrote: also, they bitch to all thier friends and collegues in thier industry of choice about how they feel ripped off by the product, which is how a lot of people make thier choices about what to buy and not buy..

This is an important factor right? I for one was so excited about my successful recordings done in Live last night, that all day I had been praising it to high heavens to my friends and collaborater. In fact, after we finished recording, we watched the beat repeat movie like good, wholesome dorks, and I just vibed off of the whole experience, eagerly looking foward to years ahead, and working with this app in a professional context- but I was so happy that I completely forgot how pissed off I am that we still don't have either the option of "performing" in the manner that I am used to any more, via recent modifications.

As of now my convincing, charasmatic way of charming people with the infinite wonders of Live has been replaced with a introspective delay, and a reluctant delivery:

"if you have a very powerful computer, very specific hardware, and the patience to wait out some uncharacteristically odd responses to program changes and bug fixes, it will work as rcording device- but not a DAW. It will also work as an instrument, but you have to be extremely careful."

I used to say:

"are you f&*cking kidding me? You don't already own it- what do you mean you never used it!?"

Edit: removed sample clip. Threads been hi-jacked into some other bullshit now. Thanks!

Rule of thumb, from my experience: If an arrangement will not play completely through with pops or clicks, and or is dangeroously close- don't excpect it to render successfully either. I think some people feel that the rendering process somehow is unaffected by the th way that process are loaded up in ram, but if I had to guess I would say that is wrong. From my experience, every arrangment I had done in 4 was riding the edge of cpu use. Once I loaded them up in 5 they were all over the top. One thing I did was try to render tracks into audio, because it seemed to work faster than freezing (for whatever reason- I could be very well hallucinating about this one.) Eventually, however, after I had sorted things out, lowered #'s of voices on synths, etc, I would try to render it, knowing that it was arranged correctly, and that it would be too much If I just played it back. My recordings came out useless.

I could be fantasizing this whole thing. For all I know I won't be able to reproduce this in the recent version. This is a pattern that I have come to take as a given. If your tracks are not rendering correctly, try consolidating the tracks into two independent aiff files first, and then render those two together.

I hope this helps! In fact, I hope that no one else is experiencing this, and that my problem is unique to my setup.

Oh yeah, I really like that clip!

I am having the same trouble, and I rendered at the same Sample Rate that all of my files in the tracks were at, and it stopped popping. Then I did the conversion with another program.

Perhaps you've all tried this but it seems to have eradicated the problem...at least for now.

Hi,

I'm a performing electronica artist from Copenhagen.

I use Live 5.03 on a cheap ass celeron 2.2 processor with one gig of no-name ram on a slow hard drive. I use Battery 2 from NI as my drum sampler - and use mainly hardware synthesizers for my synths. If I don't use outboard synths I rewire to reason using two combinators. I usually record the output of them while saving the rsn file and retaining the live clip in the als file (two channels - one midi to reason and one audio from reason). I almost never go above that. I use a novation x-station (actually an upgraded control audio), an mpd 16 and a microKONTROL (for those interested my synths are microKorg, k-station and a basstation)... I often record between three and four vocal tracks.

I split my battery up into 2-3 different outs and route them to different channels thereby saving cpu for other tasks.

I do almost all my work in the matrix view or whatever it's called - and I've been doing this for two years.

A hell of alot of VSTs screw live up. I won't even begin to mention the vast amount of different bugs I've experienced with them... so I stick with this model.

This is my good list :
Battery 2.1,
Reason 3,
impOscar,
Izoptop Ozone 3... and that's it...

I don't have ANY problems. I hope this might inspire something.

LOFA wrote:

supster wrote: also, they bitch to all thier friends and collegues in thier industry of choice about how they feel ripped off by the product, which is how a lot of people make thier choices about what to buy and not buy..

This is an important factor right? I for one was so excited about my successful recordings done in Live last night, that all day I had been praising it to high heavens to my friends and collaborater. In fact, after we finished recording, we watched the beat repeat movie like good, wholesome dorks, and I just vibed off of the whole experience, eagerly looking foward to years ahead, and working with this app in a professional context- but I was so happy that I completely forgot how pissed off I am that we still don't have either the option of "performing" in the manner that I am used to any more, via recent modifications.

As of now my convincing, charasmatic way of charming people with the infinite wonders of Live has been replaced with a introspective delay, and a reluctant delivery:

"if you have a very powerful computer, very specific hardware, and the patience to wait out some uncharacteristically odd responses to program changes and bug fixes, it will work as rcording device- but not a DAW. It will also work as an instrument, but you have to be extremely careful."

I used to say:

"are you f&*cking kidding me? You don't already own it- what do you mean you never used it!?"

me to Lofa. One time e used to tell every persons to buy live 3 and 4. Not with live 5. it is still the greatest but i cannot embrace it to other people like I used to because of some bugs

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.

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.

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.

doesnt sound as good? or just different.
can you explain your answer?