Ableton Forum

...IF it is in the background.

Many of my projects take a couple of minutes to load in Ableton. So I like to fire up Firefox and check email or something while waiting.

Whenever I do this, Ableton ALWAYS crashes when loading a file.

If I keep Ableton in the foreground, it NEVER crashes when loading a file.

I run on a Mac G5 2.5GHz Dual, 6 GB memory, Mac OS X 10.4.9.

All of my projects use VIs. It does not matter which VI I have in the project. I use Spectrasonics, MOTU, NI, and EastWest VIs.

This is a problem which does impact productivity a bit - it adds up to maybe 15-20 minutes a day that can't be multi-tasked - anyone know any workarounds for this?

Next time it crashes, check the logs, you'll see something in there that's causing it to crash, like com.ableton.something or other. or com.microsoft.something.

Hi, does this also happen if you load a Live Set without any external plug-ins?

I would recommend to locate the Live log.txt ( /User/Library/Preferences/Ableton) and live.crash.log (search for Crash Reporter to locate the crash log) and email it to [email protected].

Daniel

Yes it is only with plugins. The basic default file with no data in it doesn't have problems.

Well here is the log.txt - it happens when reading my undo file...I guess I'll send that to ableton as well...

"

16111 ms. Default App: Begin ExchangeDocument
16422 ms. LSongAgent: Begin SetSongUnit
16428 ms. LSongAgent: End SetSongUnit
16467 ms. Audio time allocations: Midi Delay: Capacity/Used/Failures: 74898/0/0
16468 ms. Audio time allocations: InterDomainEvents: Capacity/Used/Failures: 47662/0/0
16837 ms. LSongAgent: Begin SetSongUnit
16854 ms. LSongAgent: End SetSongUnit
17734 ms. Default App: End ExchangeDocument
17738 ms. Exception: There was an error when reading the file “/Users/jpiscitello/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 6.0.3/Undo.cfg.”
17738 ms. Exception: 00907BD4
17739 ms. Exception: 0090748C

The other thing that is unique about this is that it *always* happens when Ableton is in the background and *never* happens when Ableton is in the foreground.

This should be a very clear bug to identify given that condition.

you should delete your undo.cfg file. it's obviously broken. it's ok though, unless you are trying to recover from a crash.

Yes, I do delete the undo file form time to time, but the problem always comes back.

Perhaps there is something in the way plugins are handled that is messing with the undo file.

I noticed that sometimes I make a change in a plugin setting, and then there is an undo record in ableton. perhaps ableton detects the change via the vst APIs, and puts it in the undo queue, and this is what leads to the crash when I load the program later.