Ableton Suite 8
But all the weird issues I’ve been having with Ableton Live since upgrading to 8.0.9 a few months ago have only furthered my extreme skills in putting-off everything besides mindlessly surfing the internet for hours and whoring achievements on Xbox 360.
First there was the issue of Massive no longer being recognized/seen by Live. The VST was right in the folder with all the REST of the VSTs but Massive wouldn’t show up in the plugin folder. And any Live set using it would report it couldn’t find the VST and that MIDI track was worthless.
However, that was fixed after some help from the support staff…I just had to move all the VSTs to another directory and change where Live looked for them. It scanned the new folder and found everything as it should. So that was cool.
But upgrading to 8.0.9 introduced another awesome new bug: the disappearing registration bug. Going from 8.0 > 8.0.4 > 8.0.5 there were no problems. I didn’t have to re-register or reactivate my copy. But suddenly with 8.0.9 I did. And that used up my last activation. A simple email to Ableton can get me additional activations (I had to reinstall Windows a LOT…stupid Vista, then new motherboard and CPU and finally Windows 7 upgrade) but still…why should I have to contact them for more when a simple upgrade from an existing installation shouldn’t have forced another activation in the first place?
Now we’re in 8.1.1 (which seems to be the first patch in what may be a series of patches to fix a number of enormous bugs, as admitted by the Ableton top brass) which uses the same new file format that 8.1 introduced. For those unaware, this new format makes it impossible to open any file created in 8.1.x with any version prior to 8.1. And now I’m having MASSIVE (no relation to the previously mentioned NI Massive) problems with simple playback of tracks. I’ve got a song I’ve been working on here and there for the last 2 months and just listening to the set is almost impossible as Live starts clipping, ASIO4ALL freaks out and performance comes crashing almost to a halt.
I’ve no idea what the problems is as this has NEVER happened before…it almost seems like the system is running dangerously low on resources and is swapping from the HDD rather than the RAM which is introducing lag/latency/terrible performance…but that’s ridiculous. I’ve got 4GB RAM and it’s barely ever over 70% in-use. And the CPU can’t be overloaded because it’s a Core 2 Quad Q8200. There’s NO WAY I’m using all 4 cores at 100%.
It’s baffling and sort of maddening because I’ve got time off and WANT to finish up this song (at least a demo of it anyway) and I literally can’t because performance is suffering so terribly. Ugh! I hope the next patch releases soon and somehow magically resolves this! C’mon Ableton! I love your DAW (the whole Suite, really) and you’ve never steered me wrong before!
UPDATE 1:51pm 1/15/2010
Welp…it would seem I’m the fool. I forgot I disabled multicore support as an attempt to get Live to recognize NI Massive again. It was a suggested fix I found for another somewhat similar problem and so I tried that to no avail and guess I forgot to re-enable it. I just did and Live is back to working beautifully. Now, to go play some Dragon Age: Origins in celebration!
Tags: Ableton, Ableton Live, Annoyances, Guitar, Massive, Music Production, Native Instruments, NI, NI Massive, VST
