Ableton Forum

Dennis DeSantis wrote: - While it's true that we try to keep track of issues wherever they happen, it's certainly helpful for our support team to hear about a crash as well. If you experience a crash or bug, please contact support: http://www.ableton.com/pages/support/co ... al_support

Best,

Hi Dennis,

I understand you guys are doing your best to make live stable, and thats good. However, I dont have enough time at my hand to report every crash I get. It would be cool if there was an option in live to automatically send the crash log to support. I´m sure you would get a whole lot more reports if that feature was implemented. I remember the beta versions had something like that.

Grappadura wrote:I understand you guys are doing your best to make live stable, and thats good. However, I dont have enough time at my hand to report every crash I get. It would be cool if there was an option in live to automatically send the crash log to support. I´m sure you would get a whole lot more reports if that feature was implemented. I remember the beta versions had something like that.

Completely agreed, and we're working on ways to make crash reporting more automatic.

Best,

Dennis DeSantis wrote:Hi folks,

We're sorry to hear that people are having issues with Live.

Our recent announcement regarding our bugfixing initiative is serious - we have suspended development on new features until Live 8 is stable. [...] While it's true that we try to keep track of issues wherever they happen, it's certainly helpful for our support team to hear about a crash as well. If you experience a crash or bug, please contact support: http://www.ableton.com/pages/support/co ... al_support

Hi Dennis. Nice stuff on thinner -- keep it up! (I'm "Selffish")

Seeing as you are kind of insider @ Ableton, I would like to express my couple of thoughts about improving Ableton's support system.

The usual scheme: I recently got Live 8.1.1 crashed when performing a certain task. I then reported it to [email protected] and shortly (in a day or two) received an e-mail asking me to do the obvious things eg deleting the undo.cfg file, repair permissions, update all 3rd party plugins to their recent versions. Done that, been there. Another e-mail advising to try something else. OK. Throughout the year I hear all the same standard suggestions, e-mail per e-mail as soon as I report my new problem to the support. It's OK. They can't possibly assume I do things that they advise on a regular basis before reporting an issue. It's OK.

The problem is elsewhere. I cannot afford beta-testing software. I do not install beta versions and I do not work with beta versions. Someone from support constantly advises me to install beta version of Live to see if the problem I experience persists in the beta. I've been doing it in the past for a while but then stopped seeing how much time it consumes. I make music, why should I spend my time beta-testing underdeveloped software products to see if the problem persists in the new version? Why cannot Ableton folks first attempt to replicate this problem on a system similar to mine (I have nothing extraordinary - a 2.4Ghz MacBook running on Mac OS X 10.6.2) to see if they don't even need to ask me to test it with new beta? What the support person did in reality -- he did not say they were unable to replicate the issue, he said that I should go and test it with the new beta. And this is a problem I have with Ableton support at this moment. It removes the wish for reporting any more issues.

That said I continue using Live both for production and live performances and I also truly hope that the year of 2010 brings back the confidence in reliability of Live 8 to all users across the world.

Peace,

Andrejs

Hi locojohn/Selfish,

Nice to see you here, and thanks for the great music!

Good points in your post, and one in particular I'd like to address:

The problem is elsewhere. I cannot afford beta-testing software. I do not install beta versions and I do not work with beta versions. Someone from support constantly advises me to install beta version of Live to see if the problem I experience persists in the beta.

While it's true that beta versions are generally considered "bleeding edge," and not stable enough for production work, we think our current strategy is the exception to this rule. For example, although 8.1 was an official release version, we are quite sure that the current beta version is substantially more stable than 8.1. So a suggestion to "try the beta" in this case is not just a generic answer, but also a claim about stability - this version will almost certainly be more stable than the one you're currently using.

Best,

jamief wrote: In 93 we played the ministry of sound in London Live with atari st cubase 909, 303 jd800 moog prodigy enoniq eps 16+ and two mixer racks and that was not backed up and 80% of it was a jam with a few midi lines dictating some sort of structure.

that's the sad thing about live being unstable: You are forced to play it safe, render everything into blank audiofiles and trigger them instead of improvising and tweaking live.

Dennis DeSantis wrote:

Grappadura wrote:I understand you guys are doing your best to make live stable, and thats good. However, I dont have enough time at my hand to report every crash I get. It would be cool if there was an option in live to automatically send the crash log to support. I´m sure you would get a whole lot more reports if that feature was implemented. I remember the beta versions had something like that.

Completely agreed, and we're working on ways to make crash reporting more automatic.

Best,

+1 that would be real good.

SubFunk wrote:

Dennis DeSantis wrote:

Grappadura wrote:I understand you guys are doing your best to make live stable, and thats good. However, I dont have enough time at my hand to report every crash I get. It would be cool if there was an option in live to automatically send the crash log to support. I´m sure you would get a whole lot more reports if that feature was implemented. I remember the beta versions had something like that.

Completely agreed, and we're working on ways to make crash reporting more automatic.

Best,

+1 that would be real good.

+1

since microsoft introduced this, they had much more information on what actually goes wrong in windows, and could finally start to priorize the important bugs. and when we compare winxp (first version with no sp or something) to win7 now, we see how far they got. (same for office).

they do the same (optionally) for usage statistics, to be able to clean out old unused components of the os in the future.


automatic reporting of anything might have some privacy issues if not done right (which is why it's still always optional), but it definitely helps to make a product evolve well. go for it!

locojohn wrote: I cannot afford beta-testing software. I do not install beta versions and I do not work with beta versions. Someone from support constantly advises me to install beta version of Live to see if the problem I experience persists in the beta. I've been doing it in the past for a while but then stopped seeing how much time it consumes. I make music, why should I spend my time beta-testing underdeveloped software products to see if the problem persists in the new version? Why cannot Ableton folks first attempt to replicate this problem on a system similar to mine (I have nothing extraordinary - a 2.4Ghz MacBook running on Mac OS X 10.6.2) to see if they don't even need to ask me to test it with new beta? What the support person did in reality -- he did not say they were unable to replicate the issue, he said that I should go and test it with the new beta. And this is a problem I have with Ableton support at this moment. It removes the wish for reporting any more issues.

Andrejs

Same opinion no beta, thank you very much.
Another issue is rather messy installations procedures in version 8, some stuff gets installed, some not nad the old versions accumulate, 1 Gb each, cant even delete them unless with revo, which is tricky again since it may delete activation or some other stuff. Installing uninstalling Live 8 is a lottery. That is why I am not keen to test anything. BTW. all tabove applies to version 8 only not any previous ( user since ver.3)
I dont know how much better or worse is NI Service Centre copy protection but from user point of view 1000x better. I dont care what it does, let it investigate whatever wants to find my legality. Activated Traktor on few computers ( never more as 2 at a time)and never had to call them for any activations.
Same with upgrades - download , it uninstalls the old version , installs new, und tchuss.

to put a fine point on a hard lesson, it seems like Kenny picked up a bug while developing a set. maybe saving the set off with different revisions could have helped, not that we should have to do that, but... (Live does have a big ol' BUTT these days.)

that was an interesting read, thanks.

lark830 wrote: In my situation, I had no problems with 8.1.1 until this weekend!

Anyway, to the problem I was having. And why I used a beta version...

I did a live show at a club called Fabric in London a few months back and it was fine...No crashes! The version I used then was 8.1.1

By the time Friday night comes around, it's crashing constantly and I'm freaked that it will crash during my show.

Kenny Larkin

Since I know Dennis is reading this thread, first off a HUGE thanks Dennis for your hard work and subsequent contributions to Ableton Live that we have all benefited from, but here is the gist of what I want to ask you:

Why does Live 8 crash with the same basic footprint or routine behavior as Kenny describes above? It's been the same since 8 was released from day one. Whatever upgraded generational version of 8 you are using, that version seems to work flawlessly for a few weeks and then all of a sudden, out of the blue with no hardware/software changes it starts crashing more and more until it's no longer even tenable to use it. It's a known fail.

Now, what is going on here? This is not just a case of specific bugs because just about anything will make Live crash when you get to this point. Something is happening within the program itself to generate this kind of predictable behavior. Is this some type of data corruption propensity that is somehow inherent to Live 8?

Hi zee verkawound,

There's definitely no one answer for why Live crashes, nor when.

The behavior you describe is absolutely not reproducible for all users. In fact, this is part of what we're trying to sort out now - why is Live ABSOLUTELY stable for some users while it's reproducibly and predictably unstable for others.

If there really was a "known fail" scenario, then we'd simply fix it and be done with it. I wish it were that simple.

Best,

Dennis DeSantis wrote:Hi zee verkawound,

There's definitely no one answer for why Live crashes, nor when.

The behavior you describe is absolutely not reproducible for all users. In fact, this is part of what we're trying to sort out now - why is Live ABSOLUTELY stable for some users while it's reproducibly and predictably unstable for others.

If there really was a "known fail" scenario, then we'd simply fix it and be done with it. I wish it were that simple.

Best,

Dennis I apologize for my lake of clarity. I don't know too much about software code and such. I just know what I am attempting to describe is accurate from my perspective.

I fully realize that there is no one reason why live crashes. That's my point exactly.

I hear the same thing over and over from users on this forum. Once the program starts crashing in whatever generation you are using at the time, almost anything will make it crash. It's like walking on egg shells once the random and frequent crash condition progresses to this point. The CPU meter spikes like crazy and the program crashes more and more frequently no matter what you are doing. It is NOT crashing because of any CERTAIN or SPECIFIC cause as in a "bug fix".

This is what I think happens and I admit this is just an ignorant guess. Somehow the program gets corrupted by either saving the corruption into the scheme of it's self or by effecting the read/write process within the program's normal command line functions. When this progressed state of random and frequent crashes has been reached, even hot swapping devices you have hot swapped a hundred times prior in the same generation upgrade will cause the program to become unresponsive and lock up with that looped hard loud chatter/buzz from the soundcard.

Why else would the program work great doing virtually the same thing over and over and then all of a sudden start crashing, then the crashes get more and more frequent. So you go and download the latest version update and it's fine again for several weeks until...the whole cycle starts over.

As someone who spends more time debugging code than actually writing it, my first guess would be there's a memory leak somewhere -- the longer you work, the more RAM that gets 'lost' until everything seizes up. And if it's not a memory leak, it may be a rogue memory write that sometimes hits somewhere important, and sometimes doesn't...

Both of these are a total bitch to hunt down -- anything reliably reproducible is pretty easy to fix (assuming the real error isn't something like "hmmm, we need to completely rewrite our garbage collecting" or something else huge). It's the non-deterministic stuff that will drive you crazy.

Better automated submission of crash logs will go a long way toward helping I imagine.

edit: Devs, if you don't use something like Purify, maybe you should consider a license.

@ jamief - Mission Accomplished.

Although, I wouldn't call it graceful

Outside of getting them to say that they're still working on it, I don't know that a whole lot was accomplished as far as changing the actual pace, but if all you really wanted was acknowledgment, you got it.

What zee verkawound described sounds like what would happen to me in 7 whenver I had a vst plugin that wasnt jiving with ableton.

Not saying thats it, but something to look out for.