A friend of mine is running a cracked version of Ableton Live v7.03, on PC.

She is trying to open a recent ALS file but it says 'invalid pointee ID'.

Her copy turned into a demo, and her current song became corrupt. I assumed it must be because she goes online whilst having Ableton opened, I keep telling her not to, but she still does it!

So I'm assuming Ableton has 'phoned home' and turned her cracked copy into demo mode, and corrupted the file?

We tried deleting preferences.cfg file, we tried moving the vst folder, tried renaming the ALS file, and reinstallation of ableton.

We even tried it on v8 on another machine, nothing seems to restore the ALS file?

Zone alarm has ableton.com blocked, but it seems they still find a way to detect you are using a cracked copy? I thought cracked copies we supposed to be safe?

Anyhow, if anyone knows a way to open this file, please do let us know, your help wwill be greatly appreciated.

PS: we also looked into the crash logs to find a recent crsh but unfoirtunately there was not one recent enough. Shame because the tune she was working on was killer! Please help if you can! Thank you!

 

Always use cracked DAWs with internet off! Your right, it did find out the version is cracked. Um sorry to say, but your file is unrestorable.... It found out so they purposely ruined the project file.
I know a guy who works for Ableton, the only way to restore the file is actually sending it to their Development team. Programs like ableton need to be bought because they will find a way to screw ya if you dont.
Keep producing

 

Thank you for your input kind sir. I personally never even go online on my music system, but she always has to have it connected in the background, needs to be constantly connected to the world! I dont get that mentality, especially if it means your tracks are in danger. I guess ultimately buying the product would be best.

I did think that ableton had screwed it deliberately, but if ableton can fix the file by sending it to them, then surely we must be able to perform the fix as well? Just need to know what the 'fix' is. I changed the file extension to .txt (text file) to see what it contained, but the writing means nothing to me, looks like some foreign code!

If anyone else has an suggestions, please do let us know.

 

You can open ableton projects with winrar. It contains some XML files and stuff.
If you know what makes it crash, all you have to do is edit some files.

Hope it helps!

 

Thanks for your input, I tried that to see what would happen, winrar gave no option to extract, but 7zip did give me that option. However, when i tried to extract I got an error, like you normally do when a rar file is corrupt, so even that isn't possible.

I am slowly running out of ideas!

 

You just have to open winrar and then browse to the folder where you have the project (everything inside the winrar window), then double click the file, and you're browsing the files of the project.
I did it with winrar once, idk if 7zip can do it.
But if you reeaally need it, you could try with winrar...

Cheers!