So last December I went to my uncles funeral (no need for sadness, he was 87 and lived an excellent life!), which gave me some time away from the internet and day to day shit, I got DOWN with Ableton and sketched out like 10-15 new songs. sadly, I lost the USB I stored them on... ughhh. I was pretty sure they weren't gone gone, but I sure as fuck couldn't find it. Cut to last night: FOUND IT!
Man, I got busy last night on one of the songs, damn near 5-6hr of work on one track, it's coming out RIGHT, but then... I opened up a track that had a few instances of LFO Max device on it. BAM, crash. This is not a new issue, happens to me all the time, but I restart Ableton, get my wortk back. Works flawlessly. But this time... THIS TIME, Live wouldn't recover. Every time I tried, it would open for about 1-3 secs, then crash again. This was a never-ending loop. After prolly the 30th time I tried to open, I accepted the fact that my work was gone. And of course, I DIDNT SAVE.
So I now decide to take Live Max device crashing issue seriously. Of course, there VERY little about the issue online that actually give me help. Any u guys kno anything?

 

This is such a cunty issue, and it kind of beggars belief that Ableton still hasn't addressed it.

I've figured out a couple things that sometimes help on my system.

1) One way is to open Live, then just drag a couple m4l devices into your blank project, and then open the project that's a problem. Seems like a lot of the time what happens is that Ableton has a hard time initializing M4L while opening your project at the same time.

2) Very recently I had this issue and the only thing that helped me was to open my project from file explorer instead of opening it from a context menu in Live.

3) if these don't work i got no freakin clue

 

Thanks man. Im so pissed I lost my work I don't even wanna look at Live rn. But Im gonna go thru a few of my other tracks that Im sure ive got M4L device on it and remove them until Ableton can be arsed to FIX THE PROBLEM. I've always had a very good experience with Live, but this, this is simply irresponsible from Ableton.

 

i had this same problem with the m4l
convolution; when i used multiple instances throughout a single project, crashes happened often on project startup. seems thats a big issue - using many of the same type(i also had this problem with the lfos). also i noticed over the years that the "max" based patches that only do midi processesing - like sequencer or humanizer - man ive been able to have 30+ of those in a single live set and it never ever crashes. seems only the msp- audio processor based ones or the ones that latch onto other parameters(like lfos) cause these crash problems.you would think ableton could get them to each run in a "sandbox" so if one crashes, it doesn't kill the entire app. bitwig does this great.. alas.

anyway sometimes for me renaming (or moving) the m4l devices, then opening the project, then renaming or moving them back so that ableton can find them again - helps me pinpoint the problem ones (this technique also helped me isolate vsts that caused abes to crash on project startup).

 

2) Worked for me a few times too.

Sometimes I had to load an older project (from the backup folder) and then reopen the newer project and no problem.
Don't forget to send crash report each time, and/or contact Ableton support. ;)

 

i kno it too....this issue...but i got a thousand project version all the time so could figure it out always..

 

yeah man that worx too

 

It happens pretty much at random for me and is not reproducable. You can recover your project at least to the major extent if you create a new project, open the corrupted project in the browser and drag&drop track by track to your new project. The only thing you cannot recover that way are group tracks.

 

Thanks but that wouldn't have worked in my situation, as I had the choice to recover my project only at the start of Ableton. If I choose to open another project, and NOT recover my last song, I'd still lose it and then there's no tracks to recover. No matter, its gone. Uggghhh

 

Does Max get recognized like other plugins in LIve? When this happens to me I can usually hold option key and open the problem session which boots with all plugins dissabled. Then I can remove the problem plugin and reboot as normal.

 

So here's where I'm at: I've found some 10 or so songs (I stopped looking after 10) that use one or ten M4L devices that cause the crash. Everything is fine with the songs, they play UNTIL I open the track with the device, then it hangs for 1-2 secs, and crash. I am Unable to remove the device, no matter what way I try, opening the song from the browser, Explorer, pulling the specific track into a set Live set and trying to remove the device there, NOTHING. My songs are rendered useless in sorts. However, none have crashed so bad as the song I referred to earlier. they just crash, and I'm able to reload the set after re-opening Live.
Here's my thing tho: All Live sets are just code. Like a set just has references to what vst, device, or track setting is doing what. So in essence, if I were able to open the code for a set, I could fundamentally remove the code that says the M4L device is there, Voila, no more device. Or if it would work, set the device to "off", if that would work. I'm gonna ask the wizards at Ableton to see what's up. Hopefully, they don't ask for my serial...

 

Don't panic. Here's where your recovery files are located:
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/a...e-8-9-Recovering-a-Set-manually-after-a-crash
next step: turn on autosave.

 

A: the recovery method u posted only refers to Live 8 and 9. I'm using Live 10, which has a different set of files somewhat. It's useless. Thanks tho.
B: Autosave was on, however it would still be useless as it would save the song with the offending M4L device, so the whole process would be restarted.

Nonetheless, IVE SOLVED THE ISSUE in not just one but TWO ways, and its simple fixes.
Depending on which device is the offender the M4L device could be from any Live pack, but likely from Ableton M4L bundled, which comes with Live 10+ or in my situation, from Max for Live essentials, which has a different set of M4L devices (my device was LFO MIDI M4L, which doesn't come bundled with Live 10, but comes with MaxforLive Essentials 4). Luckily, the M4L devices are simply plugin applications, so simply removing the app does the trick.
1) Simply track down the offending device (*.amxd) in Explorer (or Finder) and delete it. Now when u open ur project, the device will be missing, like when Live can't find a VST cause u didn't install. Done.
2) Updating MaxforLive Essentials or Max for Live 8 to the latest version should work as well, updating the plugin to work with Live 10.x.x. I can't test this, cause I can't find a later version of Max For live 8, but I found info on Reddit that says it works. Yay.

(side note: The external version of M4L seems to work better than the bundled version as it gets updated before Live gets updated(?) so no waiting for 10.1, just get the latest version of M4L.)

I wish I had fixed this shit before I lost all my hard work, but at least I won't have this issue again. I'm wondering if its Ableton way of making sure u stay updated with the latest version of Live/Max for Live. Curious. Hope this helps u guys!

 

A: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/a...ve-10-Recovering-a-Set-manually-after-a-crash
B: you said you didn't save...

 

You need to get a decent backing up system in place. I always save 2 copies of a song. Also, you can find the Ableton recovery files manually if you need to. I can't remember the path, but they are in a folder somewhere.

 

Again, irrelevant if I saved or not as until I was able to remove the devices, I would still be in the same mess i.e. I'd find out eventually that the M4L device was gonna cause the same situation all over again. But u stated "autosave", which I assumed was Abletons recovery, which is always on. There is no "autosave" afaik.