Ableton Forum

So I migrated from Pro Tools to Ableton + Reaper a while back when Avid made their stuff all subscription based. But now that I've been doing that for about 5 years, I'm starting to get A LOT of broken projects because even if I have all of the same plugins installed and all the same virtual instruments, it just won't find them if the plugins have updated. I have Waves Ultimate so it keeps everything updated and therefore the plugins are always at the latest version.

I've lost so much stuff to this, is this really the way it works? Let alone if I visit another studio, nothing will be in place. People use this software professionally, so I don't understand how this is feasible when all my work just vanishes on regular intervals. Like honestly, is there just something I'm missing? Surely this is a deal breaker to all professional utilisation?

Meanwhile, even though Pro Tools pretty much sucks these days, I can open 20 year old sessions and just as long as I have a plugin of the same name that has the same parameters, it just works. It doesn't care about VST versions or operating system, it just opens everything. I've never lost a minute of work to these issues. Reaper has also not dropped a signle plugin, though I don't have as long a history with it.

Not even mad. Just confused and wondering how people get around this issue. Now I know to bounce every track as audio, but back when I started I couldn't imagine it would work like this.

(And yes, I know there's a paradox in not wanting to pay for Pro Tools subscriptions, but subscribing to Waves Ultimate, but the value proposition is very different.)

All I can say is that you're not alone. People keep giving me the advice to not use VST3 plugins in Live, but I have thousands of dollars invested in my VST synths and effects. I love them, and don't want to give them up. But yes, the issues I've had with Live are so numerous that I've had to quit using it. Just yesterday I tried to load up some songs that used Groove Agent, but most of the samples wouldn't load into GA. I've had presets disappear, crashed do to the analyzing of files, etc. It's unworkable for me at this point. And, I'm not a newb. I've been using DAWs since 1996. I can recreate my Live songs in both Cubase, Studio One, and Sonar, and walk away with zero issues. There's something seriously wrong with the latest iterations of Live, but don't know if it's the program or if it's Windows 10 updates. I've tried reinstalling to no avail.