Ableton Forum

So I got my free upgrade to 5.0.1 earlier today (thanks Ableton!) and proceeded to install it into my PC, which was (and still is) hosting v4.1.4.

Up pops the "enter serial number" dialog window, so I press ALT+TAB to look at the wordpad document where I have the serial. Live simply disappears off the screen and off the PC's memory entirely, leaving no trace.

OK, so I restart the app. Instead of trying to enter the serial, I close the Preferences window. Then I click the icon on the top right hand corner to take Live out of the fullscreen mode, so I can move it slightly to the side, trying to be clever: no need for ALT+TAB if I can see both apps on desktop at the same time.

So I move Live off to the right a bit, so I can see wordpad. Whoops, Live is still covering the last four digits of the serial, so I decide to move wordpad a bit to the left. Once I click on wordpad, Live crashes. Thus ended my testing of 5.0.1 on this particular PC.

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WinXP SP2, Athlon64 3000+, 2GB RAM, EMU Emulator X, TC PowerCore Firewire

just a haphazard idea: some of the problems with live5 crashing seem to be related to preferences being adapted from earlier versions of live. maybe you could try destroying your live 5.0.1 preferences-folder and try again?

That might help; thanks for the tip!

Yes indeed, deleting imported Preferences helped. I managed to enter the serial number (with ALT+TAB & Wordpad, no less), but things got tricky when I tried to activate plug-ins.

Live 5.0.1 crashed several times when scanning the VST directory. At first it was probably my fault, as when I clicked the Activate button, I messed around with the mouse a bit in the Preferences window. At the end the directory was successfully scanned, when I _only_ clicked on the browse button, selected the plug-ins directory, clicked OK - and then left the immediate vicinity. Even then shutting Live down immediately after a successful scanning resulted in a "Serious error has occurred" popup and a crash report window.

Live 5 behaved much better after that. I opened up a Live Set made with 4.1.4 without crashes, and the set played without problems. I did notice that where 4.1.4 peaked at 85% CPU and crackled a bit, 5.0.1 played that same problematic section with CPU peaking at 69% - without crackles. Also Render to Disc feature appears to be a lot quicker than in 4.1.4.

Odd thing about Render to Disc: I rendered the entire set with both 4.1.4 and 5.0.1, then imported both renders to NI Traktor, which naturally guessed the BPMs totally wrong. While manually tapping in the correct BPMs, it took Traktor only a couple of seconds to lock in to the correct 115BPM of the 4.1.4 render. Live 5 render however started at 117BPM and gradually dropped towards the 115 while I was tapping. It never got to 115 though, refusing to budge below 115.2. Weird.