Ableton Forum

I have been having an issue with opening and saving a select few Live 12 projects over the last month or two. I will open an older project, do some editing or whatever, and when I try to save Ableton will just crash. It won't let you Save or Save As this session, and it automatically deletes the session file that you opened. For example, if I were to open a project file called "Jazzy Piano Beat.als", do an edit, and try to save; it will not only crash the application but it will delete the "Jazzy Piano Beat.als" file from my computer. I was not finding these simply in the trash, they were just getting eaten somehow.

The first two times it happened, I was able to restore the lost work and I took the opportunity to bounce all of my audio out to load into a fresh project. It will let you export audio, but not save the project. Last night when it happened I was fed up, and started scouring the internet again looking for answers.

I finally saw something in another forum about looking through the crash report (I use Mac, btw) and I actually found a mention of "ZENOLOGY" fairly early in the report. When I restored my session, I did find one instance of Roland Zenology Lite (I want to be clear that this is the free version I am referencing. I have never installed pro). It was bypassed on a deactivated track, and when I tried to delete the plugin instance, the session crashed again. This time I recovered the project and opened the plugin. It immediately asked me to login/authenticate it, which I did and it appeared to come back after that. Clicking on the keys in the plugin window lit up the meters in the app, but not on the track. I just swapped the preset, the whole plugin flashed and everything worked again, including the saving function in Ableton.

Obviously I have emailed Roland support, but I felt the need to put this out there in case anyone else is having this issue. This was not easy for me to find. Normally plugins will push a login window when you open the project which loads an instance of that plugin. But Zenology won't ask until you open the plugin itself, which for me was buried on a track I deactivated after it got printed to an audio track months ago. The biggest issue was not being able to save, but periodically I noticed the DAW would lag way down, sometimes taking several seconds to light up a track I clicked on. Since signing back in, everything has been working normally. The Zenology file has been moved to a Time-Out folder so it doesn't load until this gets figured out. I get that this is a free plugin, but nothing should break DAW functionality. Free is more of an excuse for a plugin itself not working, not causing the DAW to crash.

did you hear from Roland? I have a love/hate relationship with Zenology. I've had a number of issues, including crashing. one thing that is necessary is to ensure the cloud manager and all apps are updated. If they aren't all current then you could have an issue.

@MindCV
Got here via google with the same exact problem. In my case Zenology Pro was the cause. I had an old project with some custom sounds I'd made using Zenology, those custom sounds were not present on my new Mac and I had to do 2 things to resolve this:

1. Save my custom sounds back to the user bank (may not be necessary - not possible in Zen lite).
2. Changed the preset up 1 then back down to my custom sound.

I was then able to save my session as normal. So it seems that Zenology didn't like to reference a sound that was no longer in its original location. I would certainly try changing the preset in Zenology lite and attempting to re-save in your case. That'll hopefully do it for you!

FWIW I'm not getting these crashes on a mac (M1 Max) using the VST3.