Live fucked me yesterday

[attackmode]

(sorry, no porn links included)

I generally love Live but yesterday I hated it from the deepest of my heart...

I was working on a remix for some days and it should have been finished and uploaded yesterday. Since my Internet at home is not working at the moment I decided to pack up my laptop and sound card and finish the mix in the office after work. I also saved my live set self contained, so all the samples were on my laptops hard drive.

Once I had my setup running I opened the project and after loading like 60% of the samples live gave me the "an internal error occurred" and "not enough free memory" error messages. I even could see the arrangement but Live wouldn't respond anymore. Needless to say that this gave me a good adrenalin rush.

I restarted and tried again but each time I got the same error messages popping up. I tried various things like deleting some big samples, increasing my swap file or removing some VST's. Nothing helped.
20 restarts later I gave up and packed up my things.

The Live set is consuming around 1.8 GB of Ram on my laptop (which has 3 GB, so there should be plenty of headroom). And the exact same set worked flawlessly just some hours ago.
The only thing I had changed was that the laptop was not sitting in the docking station, the external hard drive was not connected and I didn't had all my controllers connected. Nothing crucial I assumed...

Well, lesson learned. Next time I better check that everything is working after I change something on my setup, even if it shouldn't matter...

[kabuki]

Very odd. Nothing you listed should cause a problem. Perhaps its a system error or a corrupt sample. It isn't necessarily Live's error, but it could be.

First thin I would do is try to open the exact set on your main rig without all the doodads connected that you listed were not on your laptop, and see if it opens. Second, I would repackage the set from your main rig and try again on the laptop.

[attackmode]

Unfortunately main rig = laptop

So I hope that's not the cause of problem. I haven't yet setup my system at home again but I will do tonight and see what happens when I try to open the set.

Just not sure if I should hope that it will work or hope that it will not work...

[Brian Ffar]

don't forget that in this day and age, you're usually using almost 1Gb of RAM just running your OS, so with Live using 1.8Gb + your OS, you're getting pretty close to the limit.

I have no idea if this has anything to do with it, but I just didn't see it mentioned above. Just something to think about.

B

[OvertoneZero]

I too have learned the hard way, daily backups are essential ~ one less thing to have to worry about. Hope you can recover your work.

[beats me]

It may not make sense just disconnecting some hardware but did you try to open it with everything unattached before you went to the office? If I'm going to be mobile I always check with the minimal setup before I leave.

Also what version of Live are you using? I still don't feel 7 is ready for prime usage. They still haven't released an update from the original release. I'm still working in 6 for that reason until I absolutely have to use 7 for some feature and even then I save a separate "7" version before I work on it.

[djadonis206]

did you dismount all you USB's and Soundcard (if you're using an external one) properly when you left the house the first time?

I've seen people run into all kinds of problems cause they just rip the usb plug out of their laptops and come to learn something bad happened down the road


could be a power issue as well - voltage maybe.

you hear these stories of people getting their sets together at their house then get to the club and nothing works

several issues could be the reason but at this point unless you can do a rollback on your computer it's just another one of those lessons no one wants to go through - back it up and back it up often

[attackmode]

Windows and background processes alone consume around 250 MB of my RAM (I disabled all the fancy stuff). Even if all the 3 GB of real physical memory were occupied there is still the virtual memory (I've set this to max. 8 GB yesterday).

Like I wrote the only thing that changed compared to my home setup is the missing docking station, external tft, external hard drive and some midi controllers, really nothing that should have an influence on the performance of the system itself. Also when I left I did a normal shutdown before I unplugged any cables.

I'm using version 7 and it was good to me until yesterday. In my desperation I even got the latest beta but the behavior was the same. To my bad I really got depended on some of the new features (drum racks and side chain compressor, anyone?) so going back to 6 is not really an option.

It is just out of my technical understanding why I got this errors, when the same set was opened without any problems just some hours before.

Well I will try it again later tonight and hopefully it will work. And maybe I'm also able to reproduce the situation.

[Cryptic UK]

Maybe it's because ableton suck.
I love live though.

[beats me]

Yeah that sucks you got rolling deep with the new features of 7 but I think it's still buggy and has some unexplainabe problems. I've seen all kinds of corrupt and lost set problems from other people. Hopefully it will at least work again when you try it with the full setup.

And cheers to you for working on music at work, although after hours. I've had the same temptation myself since I am generally alone at work for the last couple hours.

[leonardrock]

Drank a beer....my original pissed-off post self-deleted.

[attackmode]

Loading the set on Friday crashed Live with the same error message I got in the office. So obviously this whole thing has nothing to do with the change in my hardware configuration (which would have really surprised me).
Seems like the set got corrupted when I did the last save as self contained.
Bad luck I guess.

Anyhow, I managed to reconstruct the set. Maybe this helps someone else so here's what it did:

Since the crash occurred while loading the samples I renamed the Samples folder in my project folder and Live was able to load the project without crashing. Of course all the samples were missing but everything else was there.
Then I renamed the folder back and did the find missing samples thing. Live was able to find all the samples and the project was working as before.
Save as and backup...

Still the whole thing scares me a bit.
I will defiantly double check everything before I go mobile again.

...
And cheers to you for working on music at work, although after hours. I've had the same temptation myself since I am generally alone at work for the last couple hours.

Must have looked a bit strange to the security guy to see someone nodding around in the dark while tapping on some weird illuminated device

[sweetjesus]

(sorry, no porn links included)

you may wanna take this part out of ur message now..

[landrvr1]

It's SO excellent that a word or two in the subject or message triggered that, hahahaahaha.

[leedsquietman]

How thoughtful of Louise Mosley to include the missing porn links and then go the extra mile and embed some jpegs for double measure