Ableton Forum

OK, I have found a way to consistently crash every version of 5 that I've tried including the 8 beta. Please try this and let me know us know if you have the same problem or not.

1 Load a full length song in .wav format onto an audio track.
2 Open Task Manager (Windows)
3 Click the RAM button for the track and watch the meter climb
4 Move the track left or right and watch the meter climb
5 Repeat step 4 until you run out of RAM and either Live crashes or politely tells you that you are out of RAM.

It's broken as far as I can tell. 1.5GB of RAM is all my laptop is going to take so it better be enough. This plus the GUI glitches on zooming past two full bars are my largest gripes which I would like fixed. I think that we all need to bear with Ableton as they are probably running full tilt right now.

FWIW, i can't reproduce on OSX (10.4.2 for the record)
moving a track containing a large clip loaded into ram does not make Live use more RAM on OSX.

now, did you mean to say "move the clip" rather than "move the track" ?

because this will cause Live to use more memory. but on OSX its not actually using all that memory that is listed. Active memory use stays the same, and only Inactive memory use increases (this is the lowest priority data in RAM, its flushed first when active processes require the memory it occupies)

but it doesn't crash.

maybe the problem is a Windows memory caching issue.
this may be unrelated but i do know that last week Jim Allichin, Vice President and co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division for Microsoft told Bill Gates that "Windows is Broken", and this has led Microsoft to a more Unix-centric approach for developing their next OS. just google "Jim Allichin" for more details.

sounds very familiar. Try just switching back to taskmanager and then back to live and see if your memory still increases. Happens to me (and a half dozen others all the time).

AdamJay wrote:now, did you mean to say "move the clip" rather than "move the track" ?

Hi AdamJay (big fan BTW)

You caught me here. I meant "move the clip" which is a full track or song in my case, not an audio track in Live.

As for the Gates Hate, this bug doesn't happen in live 4.14 and I think that darn anyone would agree that the last thing we need is ANOTHER mac vs. PC veer into idiotdom. But you know what they say about bad apples...

Can some concerned PC users please check this bug out? Mac users can politely ignore this thread as Mr. Jay seems to have clarified the matter for you already.

Sorry, i can't get this to happen (only got 5.01). i've been trying for about ten minutes with a bunch of long wave files, but they keep playing A OK, and the memory meter seems to be doing fine.

do you update your version of windows? all i can think of is that it's a bug that they fixed at some point in one of the critical updates i applied, but so many people seem to have memory issues it seems unlikely...

digitalhermes wrote: As for the Gates Hate, this bug doesn't happen in live 4.14 and I think that darn anyone would agree that the last thing we need is ANOTHER mac vs. PC veer into idiotdom. But you know what they say about bad apples...

no gates hate here mate! (whoah that rhymed!)
just trying to get down to the bottom of your problem, i said it might be unrelated, but it is worth mentioning since on OSX you do use more ram in this case, but it becomes inactive ram. Where as on Windows, the RAM stays active and eventually leads the program to crash.
this leads me to believe its an OS level memory caching "leak" more than a programming flop on the side of the Abletons. However, the most likely scenario is that it is both.

what version of Windows are you using?

I'm glad to see that someone is using Windows and doesn't have this problem. I'm using Windows XP Pro with SP2 and all the critical updates. I've tried every memory configuration I can think of and this happens every time. The fact that I'm not having any memory trouble with Photoshop, Soundforge, Cubase, Reason, Live 4.14 etc. leads be to believe that this problem is specific to Live 5. Perhaps it is because I am using a AMD 64 (4000+) chip? I am about to completely reinstall windows on a Athlon XP desktop and I will test it on this and report back.

Hi digitalhermes,

there are several conditions needed to run into this problem.
However this one should be fixed within the final Live 5.0.2 release.

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27816

regards,
Alex

Now that's what I'm talking about!!!!!!!!!

Thanks guys! Not only is the RAM problem fixed, but the the zooming GUI glitch seems to have been fixed as well! I only had a few minutes to test it out on my lunch, but I can assure you that that I'll give a full rip later on. I've got 4 mixes which need editing right away so I'll be busy. Fixing the GUI glitch really made my day!

Here's a perfect example of Ableton listening to users and producing a fix in a quick turnaround. I only started posting about these problems last week. Perhaps you guys knew about them before then, but this is the first version of Live 5 that I've used which didn't have these two problems. Keep up the great work