A growing list of VST3 problems in Ableton: Extreme Sluggishness and GUI Freezing. It's time to fix it.

[solovox]

Greetings Abes! Crazy to think I've been on the forum for 20 years now. I haven't posted here in quite a few years because I frankly haven't really needed to, but Houston we do indeed have a problem.

I now have a growing list of VST3s that are basically becoming unused in my setup because they freeze, especially when loading or selecting a new preset. The three biggest offenders at the moment:

Korg ModWave: an amazing synth that I spent a fair amount of money on but never use because it takes forever to load, and then any amount of selecting presets freezes the gui for ten, maybe 15 seconds. Meanwhile I can switch between presets in Omnisphere one per second if I wanted to.

Massive X: same thing, albeit a bit less problematic. But still having too many moments of sluggishness.

Generate (New Fangled Audio): this is an amazing synth that is exhibiting the exact same problem with the ModWave: loading a preset takes an eternity.

What I have learned:

1. The problem is identical on Mac or PC. Both are high-powered machines.

2. I've spoken with Korg tech support (which was a miracle in itself), and they confirmed it's 100% an Ableton Live issue and has something to do with the amount of parameters needing to be populated in Live when a new preset is selecting. (This makes little sense however with Generate, which has a modest amount of parameters).

3. Most telling: All problems go away when the plugin is used in Standalone Mode. This is the proof that it's on Live's end, not the VST3.

The Korg guy said that they have notified Ableton of this issue multiple times. I am very happy with Drift as well as the new/faster audio warping (although it is still causing some unfortunate glitching onstage during performances). However I feel that this issue is only going to get worse as synths continue to become more complex and powerful like the ones I've mentioned here.

What is the current plan to address this issue?
Thanks again for twenty years of making it possible for me to do what I do!

Carl Solovox

[solovox]

Buehler? I cannot be the only Live user experiencing these problems. I've already confirmed that with the Korg team.

[login]

Have you tried running Live as administrator on Windows and compare the performance?

[solovox]

I will certainly try it, but the exact same thing is happening on my M1 Max MacBook Pro.

[jlgrimes]

Buehler? I cannot be the only Live user experiencing these problems. I've already confirmed that with the Korg team.

I think I experienced this as well with Korg Opsix.

To be honest I haven't tried these VSTs in a different DAW to see if it works better there. Will when I get some time.

[randi]

Same with relab l480 v3 and v4

[MichaelAbletonForum]

I have the same issues. Massive X, and other VST3 freezing or crashing ableton on close. If you use the same Plugin inside an additional host eg BlueCat PatchWork then the problems are fixed.

On a lot of vst3 synth preset switching needs longer than Insider other hosts. Think this is because of the special parameter handling insider Ableton (eG spite, massive x, dune, xfer serum)

[jlgrimes]

I have the same issues. Massive X, and other VST3 freezing or crashing ableton on close. If you use the same Plugin inside an additional host eg BlueCat PatchWork then the problems are fixed.

On a lot of vst3 synth preset switching needs longer than Insider other hosts. Think this is because of the special parameter handling insider Ableton (eG spite, massive x, dune, xfer serum)

Massive X while it takes a bit of time to fully sync all of its presets, (nothing too drastic 10-20 seconds), once it is up, patches change reasonably fast (a few seconds on average).

Spire, Dune, Serum all works fairly fast for my Windows 11 machine.


The Korg Synths though (namely the "newer" ones) OpSix, Wavestate, and ModWave change presets at a ridiculously slow rate (20-30 seconds). Whats more disturbing is when you change a preset the GUI becomes unresponsive for a bit of time and usually takes up to 30 seconds to change. Since the older Korg Synths work good, (and I don't have this issue with other VSTs), I attributed this to a Korg issue and not an Ableton issue (which I'm guessing might be incorrect).

I think Gforce SEM might have a similar issue with patch changing, I don't think it is as bad as Korg's issue but patch changing on that machine is pretty slow for a synthesizer. I kind of expect VSTs such as Kontakt or Keyscape to be pretty slow with Ram/Hard drive intensive patches but wasn't expecting this for a Softsynth where patch changes should be fairly instant.


I forgot about this but will test with Reaper and/or Reason when I get some time.



An issue I have though is some VSTi fail to load at all in Ableton such as MontageConnect. This seems to be fairly common with Yamaha based VSTs with Ableton.

I think I reported this issue awhile ago but I don't think I ever heard anything back from Ableton.

[Laura Burton]

Just replying to this because I have the same issue and would also like to see a fix.

I have the problem with the Korg Wavestate and ModWave plugins and I've had weird GUI problems with other manufacturers' plugins as well. The SSL plugins for example don't always update their GUI when opening for the first time so you end up not being able to see meters or change any controls.

There are posts on other forums going back into last year with the same issues - even an official Korg Help Center entry talking about the slow program changes - https://support.korguser.net/hc/en-us/a ... leton-Live - and it's signed off with "Ableton is aware of this issue". That post is from December 2022.

Things don't feel quite as solid as they should and it does seem like there is a compatibility or implementation problem with VST3 plugins in particular.

This is a known issue for some time. Could Ableton please advise of any workarounds or if they are working on resolving these problems?

[solovox]

Thank you for keeping this post active. Sorry/glad to see it's not just me having these problems. Ableton: what's the plan?

[critter0107]

I've had this exact problem with Wavestate, the only recent Korg plugin I have. I was using Win10 at the time and never really used the plugin because of these problems. But I made a new computer, new motherboard, processor, memory and Win11. I kept my old video card and just one of my two soundcards. Wavestate works fine now. All Patches load in 2-3 seconds and there's no sluggishness to the gui. I'm happy but I still would like to know what the problem was because it might help someone else. I was using an old amd fx8320 processor and switched to a Ryzen 7 5800G. So my jump in tech age was fairly significant. Maybe that was it???

I can break it down further if anyone would find it useful.

[petal]

I see that this is still a problem in Live 12. In my case Gforce Audios Oddity3 (vst3), which is very slow at changing presets on my windows machine.
It is better at my m1 mpb (vst3), where as the same plugin in AU works fine.

Any news on the topic?

[Lumix]

if i could, i would keep using vst2/64bit only. works fine on windows 10.

also clap to vst3 works amazing.

[labtec7777]

SDD drives are better
I changed from a crap fusion drive
Mike's quicker and less crashes.
Loads so much faster
About 10 x faster.
Plenty of ram
Way to go

[petal]

VST2 is on it's way out and will no longer be supported in the near future, so I don't figure that to be a solution that will work for long. The future is VST3.

Throwing hardware at this problem seems unfair to me, since it seems to be a problem in Abletons code.

Does anybody know if Ableton have acknowledged the problem as theirs to solve?