Ableton Forum

This is my last hope. Last night I worked for hours on what I can only describe as the most powerful, emotional, and unique track I’ve ever made. I never saved it manually (yes, I know…) and Ableton crashed.

On reopening, I got the usual crash recovery prompt. I hit “Yes”, and it crashed again. On the second try, it said it would revert to the last stable version — which turned out to be from hours earlier, with only three tracks. Completely useless.

The first thing I tried is manual recovery with moving the crash folders and I even tried starting with no plugins but to no avail. Project always crashes at around 10% of recovery.
As I never saved the project I don’t have an .als file just the base, undo and crashconfig.
The issue seems to be with the undo folder. The log shows: Exception: Fatal Error: AManeuver::UnDo or AManeuver::ReDo

I know this might sound hopeless, but I’ve gone deep into the undo folder. I am certain that the full version of the song lives somewhere inside those .band files there. I can open them in a hex editor and even see MidiNoteEvent, plugin names, filenames of audio clips, etc.

At this point I don’t care about audio, samples, effects. I just want the MIDI back. I’d pay for a tool or script that can parse .band files. I’m devastated. I’d give anything to get this back. I’ve already submitted a ticket to support but this is eating me alive so before I hear back I thought I’d try my luck here.

Thanks

How I would do it:

Save the crash report and analyze it to find the reason why Live crashed.
If you use Windows, you can find the corresponding tool here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windo ... /debugger/

Here is a quick guide on how to carry out the evaluation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34R60v5gukk

I assume that the reason is a third-party plugin, as in the majority of cases.

Once you have found the corresponding plugin, deactivate it (either uninstall it regularly or remove the corresponding file from the VST folder).

Then restart Live and hope that it starts. It will complain because a plugin is missing, but I should be able to open it.


For the future: if you are working on something that contains a lot of work: always save regularly. Better 10x more than 1x too little. This applies to ANY software, because EVERY software contains bugs. Always.

x3000 wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 08, 2025 7:45 am

I assume that the reason is a third-party plugin, as in the majority of cases.

Once you have found the corresponding plugin, deactivate it (either uninstall it regularly or remove the corresponding file from the VST folder).

Thanks for your reply.
Yeah, I’ve already tested a lot of this—I disabled all third-party plugins, but it didn’t help. The issue seems to be with the Undo files that the project is being recovered from.

I’ll check out WinDbg like you suggested, just to see if the .dmp reveals something more specific than the AManeuver::Undo crash message I’m getting in the logs.