Ableton Forum

Well I'm pretty frustrated now.

I'm running Ableton Live 4.0.4 on Windows XP. I've got a few vsti's in this arrangement. Big Tick Rhino 2, Korg Legacy Collection (wavestation and legacy cell), GMedia ImpOSCar, and the Arturia Moog Mod V. After many hours working on a nre arrangement with 10 midi tracks each with a vsti loaded it seemed I could not open my arrangement anymore. This was the case on both my PC's. After much trial and tribulation I determined that no amount of un-installing, re-installing, or what have you would solve the problem on either machine. I was finally able to turn off the vsti directory and load my live set. Of course no sound comes out since there's no vsti's loaded. I shoudl mention that every track is a vsti of some sort. At any rate, I was able to export all my midi clips as .mid files to save my work. I assumed that something was amiss in my live set file so I set about re-building it from scratch. This time I saved it in little baby steps. There were 6 iterations of the file to be exact. I got my song back the way I had it and proceeded to dump it to wav which worked perfectly. I then finished working and shut down Ableton, which took about 15 minutes just to shut down the program. I then came back an hour or so later and tried to open my arrangement. AGAIN, it will not open. Aleton just grabs about 400MB of system memory and crunches and crunches CPU but will not bring up the arrangment after about an hour. I gave up and end tasked the application. I just don't get it. I'm in the program running it just fine, playing my song, and yet when I close it out and come back later it refuses to open just like the old file. On two different computers. They're the same OS, version of Ableton, and plugins mind you, but still a no go. I'm about to the point where I go somewhere else. I'm terribly frustrated that all my work has esentially gone straight down the toilet. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I have had a similar problem with one or two sets, which contain approximately the same instances of VSTis and effects as others, but for some reason take over the RAM and boost it to 700+. I end-tasked as well, but increasingly I have had to use my music PC for school, so I figured maybe some conflict and was going to re-format this vacation. Sure hope that this isn't a recurrent problem.

Sounds like your problem lies in one of your VSTi's. Try this, rebuild the song just like you were doing, from the MIDI files you exported. Then start adding the VSTi's ONE BY ONE. Put on in, the save the song close Ableton, restart and load the song. If it loads fine, repeat, until you have all VST's loaded. I'm guessing that there will be ONE plugin that will make it unable to load. If you set a plugin up and the song won't load, go back, skip that plugin and continue on. If the whole song works except for when you install that plugin, you've found your culprit.

PS..Then check to see if other have had problems with that plugin, or notify the Abletons...

Hope that helps...