DAW crashes - what are your experiences and what can you do?

#21

just had my first daw crash in years, that is the last time i’ll try going nuts with ridiculous amount of automating stuff in buffer override that is hard to automate when the cpu usage is more than half

#22

Sorry to hear that, I want to give you a like for the post but that would look wrong lol

#23

not as bad as it used to be, at least when you crash you can get most of what you’ve done back! I remember using logic 9 and not saving the file and jamming ideas then a crash comes and you lose everything!

#24

Some months ago I was working on an EP in Ableton live 10, I had a couple of tracks I was really happy with, then after a update the tracks just didn’t sound the same so I was making alterations to plugins to try and get “that sound” back but they were just never the same.

Sometime later I found the update had issues with AU plugins, Ableton have since fixed the issue but my EP is ruined, just can’t get that sound back that I had.

Back to the drawing board…

#25

That’s a problem I have not encountered yet but sounds really crazy. One more reason to always bounce stuff immediately lol…

#26

The only time I’ve had a crash in Ableton is when I had a wall of Serum synths with lots automation (it was garbage anyway).
Ableton recovered the file, though, so I didn’t lose anything.

Outside of that, when I first got Ableton, I lost some progress because Ableton rebooted without warning to apply an update. That’s when I turned off automatic updates.

A power outage caused me to lose some progress once.

Really, of its own volition, Ableton (for me at least) doesn’t really crash. I can seemingly throw nearly anything at it.
And I’m running this on an iMac from 2007, so…yeah…pretty solid, lol.
All that tends to happen is that things slow down for a bit until it catches up if I have a LOT of automation going on and haven’t converted anything to waveforms instead of midi (which I leave everything in midi 99.99% of the time).

Cheers,
Jayson

#27

I replied thinking about the MPC Live, as that is my daw, and Unity as I use it all day, not a daw but I’m drinking so it’s legit.
I save very often, like every 2 minutes and if I want to make a ‘checkponit’ I ‘save as’. Once I decide between the new and the old version, I commit to it by deleting the other one.

#28

i crash my daw regularly because i do things you shouldn’t do and it really overloads CPU, I’m talking about loads of plug-ins and effects that you control in real time, just trying to get something cool out of these terribly stacked effect chains. This really messy workflow works for me and crashing became a huge compliment. “you did good but please I had enough, no more” - my computer.

#29

When you boot up Live and a single track is already beginning to stutter, you know everything is going to end well.

#30

DAW??? What’s one of them? :grin:

#31

Still new at Reaper… was working hard on lot’s of Automation and suddenly…Black screen…hours of work lost… my bad, was so self absorbed I forgot to save! I’m getting tired of learning that lesson.

I believe I overloaded the video card with two hours of screen zoom in and out… but I’m clueless about such things so this is just rationalization by mere mortal attempting to discern what the Tech Gods are trying to tell me… :robot:

#32

For me, the crashing seems to be plug in specific. I’ve had Ableton Crash pretty consistently when using different Arturia synths. Can’t remember which ones were more to blame, but I tend to not use them for the most part.

#33

M4L fucks my shit up all the time. Sometimes it’s even my fault, because I’m bad and lazy at programming stuff.

Reaper, like Qantas, never crashed. It’s the Honda mower of the DAWs.

#34

I spend a hell loads of time to keep all my plugins & daw updated, otherwise, it all crashes quite often, but i have to say that when everything is up to date, my set-up is pretty solid.

#35

i had so many crashes few months ago, i was going mad really, i sent countless mails to ableton , they really helped me out to solve all this & for me also it was, 100% of the time, due to some plugin incompatibility : waves plugins for instance : the AU versions crashes Live & some VST ( like dourrough plugins ) are just not usable with Live, so, after spending days & days to fix all my plugins , now it all works smoothly … I know in Live i won’t use these & those & use them in Protools instead …

I avoid this crashing issue like this :
I create , sequence , sound design in Ableton Live & Reason.
I mix & pre-master it all in Protools.
… with this workaround : no more crashes.

#37

I don’t have many issues using Reaper.

I used to get errors in ACID back in the day, as well as in FL Studio. FL Studio I’d normally email them and they’d sometimes fix the bug and upload a new .exe for FL within the same day! That is one thing about Image Line, is they are really responsive to issues with the software.

With any application, the steps for resolving errors are recording the exact error given, checking system logs if possible, if that particular program has an error dump log somewhere, read those, and find what’s going on.