Restoring damaged Ableton projects?

So,

I'm currently using Ableton Live 8, running on Windows Vista on a fairly rubbish HP Pavillion laptop that gets closer to self destruction and meltdown everyday in form of crashes and overheatings. I've been using Live for some months now without issues (besides the fact that I can only run the laptop on the lowest performance due to the overheating), but lately I've gotten this message when opening certain project files:

and is then followed by another alert window saying "Abnormal program termination".

The message appears when trying to open certain projects, one specifically. The project is heavily layered with a fair load of effects and alike, and my laptop is having a hard time playing back stuff like that without the CPU going nuts and making the sound pop and lag.

I found that one thing that helped was to open up an empty Live project and THEN load up the project file, though that only works 1 out of 5 times, and if I am that lucky it'll crash and give me the same messages when playing a few layers. So I have no way to finish up that project or even recover it and I find it to be some of my best work.

So, is there a way to recover the damaged file (assuming that it's the file which is damaged?) or extract all layers, files and such for later use when I get myself a new PC or alike.

Cheers.

uhm I'm no expert in that sort of things, sorry.

even if they are not the best at it, maybe you could try the ableton custumer support ?!

  On 1/14/2011 at 1:42 AM, arbee said:

uhm I'm no expert in that sort of things, sorry.

 

even if they are not the best at it, maybe you could try the ableton custumer support ?!

It's my understanding that you people here are a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than regular support employees.

This happened to me a while back. There is one way I found to fix them, suggested by Ableton. *If you're running Windows

-Close Live

-Delete the "Preferences.cfg" , "Undo.cfg", "CrashDetection.cfg" and "Template.als" and "Undo.cfg" files (if available) from C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live Ver.xxx\Preferences

- delete the content of these two folders:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Cache\Cache\Web\

and

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live Ver.xxx\Database\

Then when you load your project it won't find any of your VSTs because you deleted your settings. Delete the VST/VSTi that is causing Live to crash out of your project. Yes, you will lose that instrument from your project, but you can always do it another way (and you can keep the MIDI data, just delete the VST/VSTi).

This has saved a few of my projects from being lost forever. I have found there are certain third party VST's that, if I have multiple instances running will always crash Live. There are also certain combinations that cause trouble. Just figure out which ones cause the problem, and bounce those to audio or freeze/flatten them ASAP.

Edit: If you're lacking CPU or RAM freezing / flattening channels works wonders

is there not a "trash can" folder ? like when you go into the program from your hard drive menu.. go thru all the data folders.. there should be some sort of trash can that will have kept your last project. - hopefully!

i know the feeling. it's fucking horrible!!! but 'trash can' has saved me many times when my computer fucks up.

and beware, don't start a new project! cos that will be the last newest thing saved in trash. ack!

This is the result of a bug with some synthedit based VST plugins in Live. The workaround is to either copy the vst plugin renaming it in the folder for instance of the plugin you want to use(lame), or to turn multiprocessing mode off in live(also lame).

EDIT: When you use multiple instances of Synthedit plugins you will more likely be running them on different processors, the 1/5 thing working is probably when you load it up and it decides to load both instances on the same processor. Try moving any synthedit vsts out of your vst folder and then load the project, add them back one by one while trying the workaround above.

EDIT2: Unless you only have a single core processor then i am totally confused.

Thanks for the responses, I tried out your way, hautlle. And this is what happened:

When tried to locate the .cfg files I only found "preferences.cgf", nothing else. I did delete the content of the two folders you referred to though.

I opened up the project, and - as you predicted - it gave me a number of messages saying that this and this VST plugin couldn't be found. I messed around and starting playing back the layers that were still active, adding some new instruments to the now empty MIDI channels and it suddenly crashed again, this time with a new message saying something along the lines of

"Memory corruption detected (0x6e). Please contact Ableton support"

So what the hell do I do here? You said I should delete the VST that was causing the program to crash, but how do I know which one it is? And how come it's now corrupting memory on the PC?

I'm starting to freak out here.

yea had this problem some time ago

I think I reinstalled all the vsts I was using and when it finally opened i saved every channel by dragging it in my folder. Don't know exactly what i did tho, took me hours of fucking around and keyboard slammings to figure it out.

It's hard to focus on the actual software when you know the rubbishness of the worn-out hardware is interfering with the process as well.

Deleting that cfg file won't cause memory corruption. If your computer is overheating that could definitely cause it. All my instructions did was delete your Live preferences so you could get the project open. Your initial problem is most likely caused by what bubba was describing (as was mine) but the memory corruption is more than likely hardware related

ok ok ok i know this is not helpful advice for what happening now but a golden rule that i have been following since about 2005 that i never break is to SAVE AS (instead of Saving over) every time you save a change on a DAW project file.

This way all of your previous iterations will not be corrupted if only the last (most recent) one becomes corrupted.

ableton is well buggy, I have stuck with 7 as it seems the most stable.

one thing that used to fix corrupt projects for me was deleting cracked vsts from my folders as they always seemed to fuck them up.

  On 1/14/2011 at 11:48 PM, Awepittance said:

ok ok ok i know this is not helpful advice for what happening now but a golden rule that i have been following since about 2005 that i never break is to SAVE AS (instead of Saving over) every time you save a change on a DAW project file.

This way all of your previous iterations will not be corrupted if only the last (most recent) one becomes corrupted.

Golden advice, this is

  On 1/14/2011 at 11:49 PM, tompty said:

ableton is well buggy, I have stuck with 7 as it seems the most stable.

 

one thing that used to fix corrupt projects for me was deleting cracked vsts from my folders as they always seemed to fuck them up.

Live 8 has been buggy since they added the Max4Live and The Bridge backends. I use a few cracked VST's but never have any problems with them. I have issues running multiple instances of things like DestroyFX VST's and other free 3rd party plugins.

It used to really piss me off, but I just bounce to audio or freeze/flatten channels that are using that plugin ASAP and then move it to another channel to use it again or whatever.

just to sidetrack a bit. how is 8 now? i have managed to put it off , relatively bug free yet?

I don't know if I've ever had a problem with Live 8 (yet). Certainly none worth remembering apparently.

I do use a few cracked VSTs as well, and all of them seem to fuck up the CPU use and make the audio crack and now eventually crash the program. One of them being the Massive synth. I love that tool, but when using that and just a few other layers at the same time it starts to go 100+ in CPU. I just thought my low performance laptop had trouble running such a big synth.

  On 1/15/2011 at 4:38 PM, Hasselbalch said:

I do use a few cracked VSTs as well, and all of them seem to fuck up the CPU use and make the audio crack and now eventually crash the program. One of them being the Massive synth. I love that tool, but when using that and just a few other layers at the same time it starts to go 100+ in CPU. I just thought my low performance laptop had trouble running such a big synth.

Freeze/Flatten is your friend on such a shitty computer.....

Or at least only do one huge vst/fx at a time and bounce to wav to keep load off your CPU....

How do I freeze or flatten the channels then? Are you referring to changing it to RAM or what? I'm not all too technical with Ableton yet

Right click a channel, select freeze channel, this will freeze it. You can no longer adjust any parameters on the synth/vst when you do this! Be sure to have any changes you want automated out. You can then flatten the channel by right clicking on it and selecting flatten. Flattening it will convert it to a wav file. This won't rape your CPU because it will just be like listening to any other wav, and will no longer be constantly processing the plug-in every time you listen through.

  On 1/16/2011 at 5:18 AM, hautlle said:

I opened up that certain project again to try and freeze and flatten channels. I added the Massive synth again and it crashed. But this time not only Ableton, no no, it crashed my entire laptop; the screen went black and a message popped up saying something about security error and it froze from there only giving out the loud beep when I smashed buttons.

There's no fucking joy in making music when you can't... well, make music at all.

blows man.

Sounds like a new computer is in order to me...

Most definitely.

I've desperately wanted to change to Mac for years now but never could afford it. I just tried putting together a custom one at Apple.com with, it ended up being about 15.000 DDK (= $2700). And I'm saving up for a trip to London with the miss this summer, so yeah... Fuck.

ya, weak sauce man. Apples are just ridiculously overpriced... You could always get a PC laptop that you could install OSX on it, but you'd have to do your research and find a compatible machine (Google Hackintosh OSX or something like that, unless this is no longer an issue?) I know very little about Macs. How old is your computer? Sounds like it's just worn out

  On 1/16/2011 at 10:02 PM, hautlle said:

ya, weak sauce man. Apples are just ridiculously overpriced... You could always get a PC laptop that you could install OSX on it, but you'd have to do your research and find a compatible machine (Google Hackintosh OSX or something like that, unless this is no longer an issue?) I know very little about Macs. How old is your computer? Sounds like it's just worn out

With Mac you seem to pay almost twice the price for looks and brand. A shame.

And my laptop is not even THAT old, I think I bought it february 2008. It's a HP Pavillion model, and as far as I know, a whole bunch of those models have fan problems. I think 6-7 of my mates own one and everyone, EVERYONE, has fan/overheating problems.

Alright...

My current plan involves saving up for that darn Macbook Pro, even if it's likely going to take a year or alike.

Let's say that I do get the laptop, install Ableton Live, transfer all project files, vsts and samples to the Mac from my PC, will I be able to open and work on the projects? Or is there some restriction with editing from PC to Mac?