Hey guys, so I've been trying to fix my Ableton Live for few days and without success. It's a really weird crash and after some tests I figured that it happens constantly after I put notes in piano roll or work on something and THEN I press anything in browser panel, it crashes. Like If I want to open a VST, folder, max device, or anything, it constantly crashes exactly when I press something in browser panel. It doesn't happen when I open Live, only happens after a few minutes of work.

I've tried different versions of Live yesterday and it keeps crashing. I highly doubt it's a VST problem because I tried to replicate this crash without any plugins, and I could do it. Just opened new set, put notes in an empty midi track, and after like 10 minutes I pressed on random folder in a browser and it crashed.

So I have no clue what it might be...

Edit: I think it should be related to Ableton, because other DAW's work perfectly fine. FL Studio, BitWig never crashed on me.
I tried to remove preferences, delete Ableton completely with Revo Uninstaller, install on a different driver, that didn't changed the situation. Sometimes it tells me that Ableton crashed but sometimes it just freezes and don't respond at all.

 

Last edited: Feb 4, 2021

Version and OS?

 

Currently I'm on version 10.1.25 by R2R, but it happens on 10.1.30, 10.1.17 as well. Windows 10 version 20h2

 

Try creating a new Windows user, and repeating your test. It might be your ableton config. Alternatively rename your ableton user dir

 

This feels like a plugin problem. Do you have any default plugins on when Live acts up?

This might or might not help: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209070609-How-to-reset-Live

 

Mac

1. Close Live.
2. In Finder, open this hidden folder (where x.x.x is the installed version of Live, eg. 10.1.1):
   Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live x.x.x/
   Note: Here's how to access hidden folders on Mac.
   
3. Delete Preferences.cfg, Undo folder (in Live 9 this is Undo.cfg) and Template.als (if present).
4. Launch Live.

​

Windows

1. Close Live.
2. In Windows Explorer, open this hidden folder (where x.x.x is the installed version of Live, eg. 10.1.1):
   Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live x.x.x\Preferences\
   Note: Here's how to access hidden folders on Windows.
   
3. Delete Preferences.cfg, Undo folder (in Live 9 this is Undo.cfg) and Template.als (if present).

 

Yeah thank you! Just did that and found some old folders of Max that I removed, for now everything works good. But I tried resetting Live before, and it didn't help, tho I instantly scanned my plugins, this time I didn't. Perhaps it's really a plugin's fault that breaks Live somehow. I'll play around with stock plugins just to make sure and then I'll scan for plugins again and I'll see what happens

 

Take a look at "PluginScanner.txt" under %APPDATA%\Ableton\Live <version>\Preferences (on Windows, I don't remember offhand about macOS). You might spot something off there.

 

Alright, so after resetting Live and scanning only VST2 and VST3 system folder, not the custom folder, it looks like it's working perfect right now.

Could it be that the problem was that I have a folder for plugins and inside it I have some VST3 plugins and folder for VST2 plugins. And when I choose to scan for custom VST3 folder, I was choosing that folder that contains VST3 plugins and VST2 folder so perhaps they didn't really go well together and were breaking browser panel and in result Live?

 

Definitely sounds like you have a bad plugin loading into your default template.

 

This might not be helpful, but some hosts do get confused if 2/3 plugins are under the same path. a VST3 plugin is basically a wrapper for a directory and it contains a DLL file that's not VST2 compatible. I keep the VST2 (in a custom directory) and VST3 (default location) separate so you might want to try that.

 

Ohh yeah that makes sense now. Probably Live is more sensitive to that, compared to FL Studio where you can choose whatever path you want and how many you want

 

Another test.

• Disconnect internet
• Deactivate non-OS firewall
• Deactivate non-OS AntiVirus

(In my case, Firewall (ZoneAlarm) was crashing Live and AntiVirus (Avast) was crashing Sylenth - or the other way around ...