Does anybody know what this action is? "fetchdownloadablepacklistfromweb"

Ableton keeps crashing on boot (not responding) and the log.txt always shows this at the last action.

I'm offline and I've unchecked both the 'check for updates' and 'check for downloadable packs'.

Always seems to happen after I've activated vst2 plugins. Done a clean install (Revo) and it works until I activate vst2.

Ableton Index is always active in Task Manager.

 

i stopped using Ableton a few weeks ago, this answer turned into a bitch session about my minor gripes that over the years have festered.

shorter version- is ableton crashing opening a specific set or just in general? sounds like in general, after switching on vst2. some troubleshooting steps you might try if you havent, that probably wont help haha. if after a fresh install ableton is working, and you activate the vst2 folder- if you point the vst2 folder to an empty temp directory is it still crashing at that point? that would say to me that it's ableton trying to call home and causing it, right? you might try that to help determine whether its an ONLY ableton issue or if its a third party plugin trying to "fetch a pack." if ableton is fine after selecting an empty vst2 folder, i guess the slow but steady method would be adding vsts in until you find the culprit thats crashing it. at that point perhaps adding that plugins websites to your hosts files to block MIGHT help. or maybe you can find like the file somewhere on another computer its looking for and transfer it to your offline rig to fix it. maybe.

Everything below is skippable, the last bottom paragraphs have some general knowledge vst troubleshooting advice for ableton, hold ALT down blah balh. basically i'm glad i used ableton for so long and learned what i did, but wow i didn't even know what i was fucking missing. from around when i started messing with beats off and on 20 years ago ive dabbled with reason, logic, fl, pro tools, even if its just to make one beat on a demo like with FL. i figured a daw is a daw, so whatever. nope.






this answer of mine is like going into the doctor with with a hang nail and they amputate, but i switched to reaper a few weeks ago after using ableton since the first cracked version i got on dialup years ago (TIME STRETCHING BY JUST MOVING THE PICTURE ON THE SCREEN WTF?!?! IT TAKES 10 minutes on my mpc!) and i'm never fucking going back. unless i play live for some reason.

now i use the sister site and it is always at the forefront of my mind when i encounter things like bugs or instability or really any bad shit... i either move on or deal with it and am just grateful/guilty someone in my position has that opportunity. so it is very well (95%) due to my excessive amount of sister site plugins and such that made version 11 so unstable, but i won't do it again. if i worked at ableton, and spent 5 minutes using Reaper I would be embarrassed I think. I think it's fair to say that ableton a long time ago made a push from "just a live performance daw" to an all in one production daw (geared towards electronic music) and in that Reaper just plain shits on it. I can freeze a group in Reaper. there are 1000 details that Reaper has that ableton doesnt- that's my biggest problem Reaper. Its so fucking dense I'm still encountering things where I dislike the default setting... but i think EVERYTHING in that program is customizable, or just about. it's insanely in depth, overwhelming so at first. glad i watched an hour worth of youtube just on just setting the initial preferences. i know that hardly sounds appealing, and honestly it's kinda brutal BUT as I've gotten Reaper more dialed into my personal liking with shortcuts themes layouts etc it is paying itself off 10 fold. in ableton annoying things you mostly just get to suck up and deal with, in reaper you spend a minute changing it and from now on smooth sailing.

i haven't even looked at reapers stock plugins, and ableton does have good stock stuff. but with the entire access of the sister site i haven't used an ableton stock plugin for years. things like HY slicer replace abletons, TAL drum replaces drum rack. reaper time stretches, i have paulxstretch. it's a process to pull tracks over to reaper, export midi and audio and all that fun stuff- but that is worth it, it is faster and more productive than sticking with ableton.

anyway, fucking ableton was/is completely reliable for being unreliable for me at this point. some vsts, like the sonible stuff, regardless of the release or how well i cleared my drive of any weird remnant of an old attempted install would work in a set, until saved, then crash at open. get latency mon if you havent. was super useful/disheartening to check out. it'll show you where you're getting the most latency from on your drivers, the top two culprits for me by far was the graphics, nivida driver at the top. its like great, the thing bottle necking the AUDIO capabilities of my system are the fucking graphics. if i had money i'd get a dedicated intel with internal graphics offline desktop for music, i understand now why people say to that gaming and music production dont mix. i THINK what was happening on mine was that these drivers, especially when the plugins GUIs were loaded in opening a set, would spike CPU usage and then ableton would just crash. i really think the instability FOR ME was that, i have a high refresh rate monitor and i think Ableton/VST GUI's wouldn't know what to do and it would fuck it up. thats my theory anyway.







OK- now that i've said that for me personally the grass is way more green over in reaper land, ive spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot ableton. one thing you might check is if you have indexing off on your music drives, assuming youre using windows. if you right click your C drive under properties at the bottom there are two boxes, one says you can compress files to save space and one allows windows to keep track of every single file on your drive so you can search faster. both of these, for music production, should be off. it COULD help (i'm saying COULD cause fuck if i know, i'm lucky i got my shoes tied today. and i'm wearing velcro!) ... but i doubt it. im only mentioning that cause you mentioned the ableton index... which i believe is doing a similar thing as windows.

has your computer ALWAYS been offline or has that changed? i mention that because i went offline a few months ago (mostly) and a few of my sister site plugins stopped working after i disabled network stuff FOR MORE PLUGIN POWERRRRR. Things like the overloud gem collection must have been cracked using like a mac address or something, i dont know i've just read a few words before. i'm mentioning that cause it sounds like it's trying to go out and download something.... do you have your host file blocking internet access to certain sites so that plugins can't call home like that? i got a little script bat file that i use to automatically add folders to windows firewall and also you can go in at the hosts level and block sites like i said... maybe that would help. if the computer is asking for that download pack perhaps its getting confused by the lack of answer, and if you block it in hosts it might get a solid no and move on. just like dating! or so i hear.


Holding down ALT as you open your set disables plugins from activating. if your set opens like this its a third party plugin id saying that causes the crash. that narrows the field. even opening the set with ALT is irritating to me, because at least how my windows is setup with minimal appearance settings, the ableton splash screen shows up UNDER the explorer window which you NEED to use in order to open the set with no plugins activated. so you're sitting there like an asshole waiting for ableton to open, but it IS open and saying it cant find the plugins you told it to not open, just under the window.

the other method is making a new set, then adding in your project folder to abletons list of things it cant see unless you tell it to look there then dragging your song one track at a time into the new set until it crashes, and then you can try to mess with the hosts files or find a fix with a better focus.... fucking jesus like why is ableton indexer always running if i need to add a folder just to open a sound. another thing- i can have unlimited plugin categories in reaper. and not some half assed workaround where vst3s work decently but vsts dont, and vice versa. like i said, i would be EMBARRASSED by the LITTLE things Ableton has failed to incorporate/fix over the course of 20 years where reaper is dropping a new version every 5 minutes. btw i've crashed reaper a few times (which is how i found out that autosave is off by default haha. the biggest downside to reaper is that i dislike some of the default preference settings... why they're preferences i guess. not a beginner daw really i'd say). ugh.... i'm gonna leave my rant here but i'll make a condensed actual answer at the top for you. but seriously, unless you're specifically using ableton for a reason (like you want to perform live with it) I would really really check out Reaper, or maybe one of the other daws people seem to like.

 

I don't use Ableton, but if we separate the words
fetch downloadable pack list from web

That means that Ableton , besides the fact that you unchecked both the 'check for updates' and 'check for downloadable packs, is trying to download a list (probably a txt file) of available material that you could download from them.

I hope this helps

 

It does Oly, thanks. Its pretty much what I was thinking and I couldn't wrap my head around that... But I think it might be the next line that crashes every time...

Not quite sure what's going on, but I removed all the VST2's and it cleaned everything up. As I'm adding them back some are slowing the whole program down dramatically...

It looks like Ableton doesn't like VST2 any more, so I think its time to remove everything except what's essential. It means tracks won't reload, but if I keep them handy it should be relatively fast to drop them back into the VST2, swap for VST3 and remove it again.

I've been noticing over the last year or so how bad Ableton has been getting and I'm hoping its just down to VST2 and that this is a fix...

But it has taken all day so far and I'm still not there yet. All trial and error at the moment...

 

Cheers for this... You are pretty much on the same thinking as I've been doing all day. Took me ages to get to the point where I'm on the same page as you are here...

Yeah if you read my reply to Oly above, it basically slows the system to a crawl with a lot of these VST2's. This might be part of what pissed you off... Its a headache because its only recent that they added VST3, so most of our tracks are only VST2, so swapping is a nightmare, but if you create a hack like I've done to swap as you go this might work... But I've still to find out if this will become faster and more stable.

I'll let you know how this pans out if it works...

EDIT>>>

In fact I can tell you already. Just turning off VST2 the synths boot ultra fast. Having VST2 even installed is a massive headache... So maybe its time to change my process, boot a track, make a list of what's missing, swap everything for VST3 alternatives and turn off VST2...

Major fuckin issue though is UAD - wankers - they're VST2 only, on top of needing the fuckin dongle... I hope this Sparkie thing actually works on PC at some point.

 

Last edited: Aug 20, 2022

Yeah I think Index was relevant to the issue. It rammed up the system for several minutes while it scanned every plugin. Some were crashing the system and some just took ages. Then on shutdown I think it was writing that into the Preferences file, along with maybe some other places related to plugins.

Comparitively, with just VST3 I tried opening a track and I've used so many VST2 its empty, but its crap like Sylenth so it really doesn't matter.

So I'm taking this as a reset moment and I'll rebuild using much better synths and just stick with VST3.

It has always been offline yeah.

 

like if you cant tell, i realize im insane hahaha but i started to feel personally attacked by an inanimate program when it would sit there opening a set id spent a lot of time on then just shutdown. wouldnt say why, just a nope fuck you it was working when you saved it and now it isnt. because. ive crashed reaper but only while freezing tracks at a stupidly high oversampled rate, cause i can and i figure it helps with any aliasing that i probably wouldn't even be capable of hearing.

i got into nebula the last few months after finally getting around to it and now i'm a fanboy. i haven't done any testing myself at all, or really tried to confirm it very much but at least from an old blurb i read from one of the library creators AlexB he said the vst2 version of nebula (i think he was talking about version 4... maybe 3 though. hmm) was faster. nebula is a cpu hog for sure, so i wanted to use the vst2 of course and it was this tiny thing that led to me switching daws.

i obviously dont need as many plugins as i have, and i'm slimming down but that being said i LIKE having a collection of like say different 1176 compressors (or whatever else). like everyone i've got my go to vsts but although i dont end up using 6 different brands of 1176s in a song I do like having access to presets for example so i can get some ideas. so ableton has a hard limit on its plugin categories of 7, some coding thing i guess. i think it's pretty weak of ableton who had the creative juices to legitimately IMHO revolutionize beat production software that they haven't figured that out. that's not a lot, and it's a stupidly small number considering its 2022. the work around is you can save vst3 presets in custom folders and then add them to the sidebar under the user stuff. however, you cant do this with vst2's as far as i figured out, you would have to group the vst2 which then you could save the group preset. annoying. BUT what i found out after spending a fair amount of time getting things organized like i wanted, is that for shit like plug in alliance, (at least on my rig) to access those presets there isn't a menu in the plugin GUI but you pick it from the DAW. those show up in the top 7 categories, i don't know how to get them to show up in custom folders.

so back to 7 categories, and a wall of "dynamic" plugins, instead of nice and easy "limiters, transient shapers, fet style ... etc". there is just so much time i started to realize i was wasting with what i consider an inefficient workflow, at least for my style. like why do i have to download an ableton enhancement suite to be able to fuckng right click and add a utility to a track? shit like that, i just can't anymore. i am using klanghelm's VUMT vst to check the VU levels for gain staging purposes and with nebula thats a lot- i just mapped it to the key Z, thats how i add it now. the two minutes it took me to search on how to bind vsts to a keybinding in reaper i wont have to learn again, and its just seconds i save but those seconds surely add up. ableton has never seemed to taken the steps to address some kinda glaring IMO user interface issues. how are they on version 11 but i have to add a compressor to a midi track and sidechain it to a group in order to freeze the audio, which i need to do because i dont trust the program to open it again if its too heavy a load. and that doesn't take into account plugin delay because its a work around i'm pretty sure. why do i have to ERASE a mastering VST to get rid of the lag- i understand bypassing it doesn't work like that but in reaper i can either bypass or just take plugins offline completely... while saving all the info of course. with a key I custom bound.

i assumed that VST3, being a number higher, was just automatically way better- but without understanding whats under the hood it appears that while vst3 DOES have a lot of advantages (thats what i tend to use too of course because of those extra options, like multiple in outs. i didn't even realize vst2 didn't do that haha until just now) i'm totally guessing here but i would bet for certain unique scenarios vst2 might still be superior performing to some developers. easily could be totally wrong. like i'm thinking of nebula, and i guess vst3 when there is no audio it can stop using cpu power where vst2 cant... perhaps in a situation like with nebula where its using this weird dynamic convulsion technology the always on vst2 works better for it. dunno, but for whatever reason there are some developers that are using vst2, soundtoys off the top, and yeah it is not ideal to me in ableton.

i kinda took one step back needing to learn the ins and outs of all this reaper shit, but i already feel like the end results on my music will be two steps forward JUST because of the daw change, because of how reaper handles rendering audio and its track management. here is an extreme example(i don't work for cockos lol, i dont work at all). lets say i want to, because i can, heavily process everyone of my tracks. got a snare, and (again just cause, this is where i realize its SO subjective to the person/situation) i want to start by adding some soothe/reso to it, then an eq, maybe a compressor OR TWO in between places at 1-2 gr just for color (not sure how many years it took to me realize that adding a compressor to a sequenced snare thats the same volume every time isnt the best way to control the dynamics... you just adjust the volume) , a little kelvin sat, stick gulfoss in there somewhere at a 1-2 db, some smart sonible/focusrite fast shit, crazy plate reverb on a send maybe- who knows the world is your oyster im the only one who listens to my music so thats what i want to do.

thats a shit load of cpu power to use live when you dont need it to. looking at my made up list, especially as i make fake electronic music i figure i would want to freeze it all, except the send because you cant freeze sends in ableton and also there are other elements being fed into it. so nbd, add all that shit to your snare, freeze it. BUT iirc correctly you need to freeze and FLATTEN the track in order to remove any latency introduced by the plugins, but flattening is destructive. so now youve got your frozen track which you duplicate, flatten the duplication and then i guess save the frozen track in your user folder in case you want to go back and make changes down the line, and then erase it. and ACTUALLY what I would prefer is to freeze the snare in chunks, so anything like soothe was one freeze, then eqs, whatever so that when i needed to change something id only unfreeze as far as i needed. im not sure the best method, i never figured one out that seemed like it was worth it, so i didn't.

now the reaper method is also laborious, i mean its making music thats the deal- but using that same really stupid chain in reaper i can very easily right click and render (in segments like i mentioned for organization purposes) tracks, it automatically duplicates and flattens the audio leaving your original track byspassed. which i then take those fx offline with a key, rinse and repeat (while using the internal oversampling feature because i'm adding all this totally unwarranted processing for shits and giggles lol)and at the end when i've got my frankensteined snare i just drag all the unused shit into a group/nested folder and i can use the track manager to hide the tracks. they're there but off screen for zero clutter, super easy to access if needed in as thorough of an organized manner as I dictate, not the daw, and the thing is i personally enjoy and like the sound of the snare (presumably) after all that because i've spent time designing it to exactly what i want in my head. and thats the entire fucking point of making music for me personally, and thats something Reaper has been allowing me to do so much more successfully than ableton. still a lot to learn on reaper for me, and i'm unsure of how not having the clip style tab will be for me, but in essence i can sorta at least recreate the idea in arrange mode, not sure about triggering loops and such though. thats where ableton is still winner, at least as far as i'm aware, for live performances where you want to do stuff like that.

bleh. ok done eating and typing. now with all that ranting done i'm gonna put my words to action and start recording some vocals into my fancy towel mic booth i built in the living room haha. also i haven't had net for so long that i need to fucking disconnect it, or else i'll keep typing about nothing.

 

also i love the clear difference between olymoon and me LOL, i write walls of insane writing while starting with "this won't help you" and Olymoon is concise and says, "i hope this helps." LOLOLOL well folks, we are indeed all extremely fortunate that Olymoon is one of our fearless and noble leaders and not me.

 

oh, lastly if anybody read this, the thing besides vst2 with nebula is that the nebula stuff DOES sound good and is really fun to use to me, but I figure you might as well go for the gold if youre using it by using 96khz libraries if you can. that adds up real quick in the CPU land, even with my amd 5800 and with how the thread work load is per track in Ableton. which led me to the freezing pain in the ass problem, or to me splitting and daisy chaining audio tracks to distribute the CPU load better. for a week or so I was still making skeleton beats in Ableton and doing the bulk of arranging in it because I can do that in my sleep, but then the process of transferring seemed like it would just better to go to all reaper.