Ableton Forum

Hi Folks,
see my previous thread on this at

Live no longer stable . 'out of memory' issue outstanding

Running Ableton V8.3 on Win 7 64 Bit box (high end 24Gb /SSD system disks) with MAx for Live 5.1.9.
Am using Max devices to mix quicktime videos in realtime and its crashing Ableton Live.
Ive dumbed down all audio /midi to just 8 rendered tracks. So now have 8 stereo audio tracks, 1 midi
for lighting control and 3 video for A/B video sequencing and finally a video mixing midi track.
Ableton is really struggling with the setup. Crashing every 10 minutes.

Unuseable for playing live. I would get bottled off stage...

This new thread is a continuation of my old thread on same subject (got closed for some reason) and I will update with
any feedback I get form Ableton support.

ctgarvey wrote:got closed for some reason)

What a coincidence...

What do you think the problem is? That Live can't handle 3 movs playing simultaneously on separate devices? I can get a device to mix two movs it is reading. I reckon that routing signal between devices is always going to rinse a system. I am running max for live on win 7 64, live is stable but I can crash max if I create complex or inefficient devices.

Yes the finger can probably be pointed at max for live here as the live8.3 system is rocksolid on Win7 64 with the dumbed down rendered audio tracks and clips and a bit of external midi and plugins (but without max for live).As I mentioned in the previous thread, it appears that there is actually more RAM available to the 32bit Live app under win7/64 than under win32.
Ive created 3 simple max for live devices that
are no doubt very inefficient (but I had 30 hours to get this up ). 2 midi to video players with hardcoded video locations and one video mixer using the quicktime colour/solarise options from one of the max tutorials,
and midi controllers to control the whole thing. The quicktime results are excellent when live/max is not crashing.
when it crashes , both live and max seem to stop together. I was curious as to how the quicktime engine was performing but it isnt spawned as an external app.

I have the same setup: Win 7 64bit. 2 hard drives (hybrid ssd), 8 gig ram, core i7 processor. This is a laptop set up, BTW.

Live 8.3 is unstable. It crashes at least 3 times a day at the studio.

Pro tools on the same computer with heavier sessions never crashes on this. Actually- nothing ever crashes- except ableton

Yes Im on a (dell workstation) - laptop too. Ive no experience of protools as 15 years ago it was too expensive
and I went down a different route.. but as a general rule in software engineering, the less communication between the main host program and other 3rd party programs, the better. I talked at length with one of the ableton support engineers about the various crashes and I have nothing new to add to their already well known 'how to conserve memory' guidelines.She basically said to stop trying to sync HD video clips from within the Live environment as it wasnt able for this. I would say , here is where Ableton leadership planning is at, right now...

How can we make money from the conversion to 64bit as most of our customer base are satisfied with the 32bit version, and a lot of hardware and plugins are still 32bit so the industry and customers as a whole have to move en masse to 64 bit....we will have to support both versions, possibly in parallel streams for a number of years..A costly mess.

We have already bloated our software massively with max for live and other stuff and this has reduced reliability. Now we are at a development crossroads. Do we try and incorporate max for live style functionality directly - can we justify the development cost? ..or is there a subset of max for live functionality that we can usurp into the main program to satisfy most needs but improve reliability..Its been shown that customers always prefer using dedicated 3rd pluginis other than lives for eg NI Kontakt instead of Ableton simpler.And thats not going to change.


Most notably Video. What are we going to do about video ? All DJ/VJs now need the ability to sync images/videos , with basic effects, to their tracks. The multimedia artist
requires this. Quicktime 32bit engine though good, needs a native live replacement. And possibly an updated VST style standard.

Support is disastrous for the likes of max for live. Ableton are supposed to support, but there is finger pointing between the support for the 2 apps. Thats a Max issue. No its not, thats a Live issue..

So its a mess right now for a groundbreaking product thats got great potential but is on the point of losing focus and trying to be all things to all people and ending up being not good enough for a large portion of them.

I think if I were the boss, I would go with a new product ;

Back to basics stripped down 64bit live with no bloatware (not unlike reaper) . Built for industrial scale reliability. Possibly no live instruments or samples.Designed form ground up for 3rd party highend plugins.Only a subset of 64bit drivers will be supported and alot of work will go into the 64bit-32bit plugin interface reliability, and only the top 10 plugin players will be tested and supported.
Video capability can be a new add on product purchased seperately for the above version..

you know that having 24gb of ram doesn't really help on 32-bit apps (like live..)
if you're hitting the ram limit.. you're probably using heavy HD videos..or heavy sample sets..
or a lot of audio loaded to the ram from clips ('ram' button)

the protools comparison in this case isn't really applicable..
you see .. protools doesn't do live video mixing at all..

but crashes.. this version(8) was full of them..
for me 8.3 is relatively stable for me with m4l.. no crashes..
then again.. I'm not really using jitter stuff..

I guess you need to know the limits of your system and work withing those borders...with some strategy
here's a nice article about how to utilize 64-bit plugins with 32-bit DAW..
http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/201 ... #more-2369

So support said you were trying to do something in max4live that it can't handle. And you're still wondering why it crashes?

Have you looked into dedicated vj software to take that side of things outside the program?

As for the planning rant, clearly you have some inside knowledge we're not privy to.

Here is a link to a video of a track on ableton that shows the video tracks and basic hd mixing and lighting sync from within live.Unfortunately, the rig is not stable enough to play live with.But the hope is, that it will be someday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfv1nSGixaE&feature=plcp

3dot... wrote:
here's a nice article about how to utilize 64-bit plugins with 32-bit DAW..
http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/201 ... #more-2369

Nice, Thanks 3dot