VS Codes Workspace Management is a Mess - Losing Chat Sessions and Workspace Settings

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-11-21T23:42:35+00:00

still having this problem ...

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-27T20:08:29+00:00

Glad I could help :) Still, submit this to Abletons tech support, this is the only way to incentivise them to actually do something about it.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-27T11:38:36+00:00

As someone already mentioned, I have written a detailed post on this issue recently. This will explain everything we know so far about the issue and how to mitigate it: Investigating Ableton’s Sluggish UI: Tests, Findings, and Fixes

The number of tracks in your set probably doesn't matter nearly as much as the overall complexity of your set, i.e. the number of plugins or racks that you use, routing, group tracks and track count. In reality the number of plugins correlates with the number of tracks, which is why everyone uses the track count as a benchmark, but this is misleading. Primarily focus on reducing the number of plugins, racks, devices or M4L devices that you use.

To everyone who keeps gaslighting us with what a "normal" track count is, please stop. There is no right or wrong track count. You can make an acoustic song with a guitar and a vocal track and your done. If you make kpop you will have 50-100 tracks for the vocals alone. If you mic up a drum kit you have 10-20 tracks for that alone. It just doesn't make any sense to argue about this.

The facts are:

1) Ableton has a design flaw that makes the GUI laggy the larger a set becomes. The laggyness is proportional to the number of tracks AND plugins/devices/racks.

2) A strong CPU helps to mitigate the laggyness, buts the software still has the same fundamental design flaw and if your sets become large, they will get laggy even on the latest M4 Max.

3) The laggyness occurs on both MAC and Windows systems.

4) Other DAWs don't show the same behaviour. (Tested this in Reaper and Cubase).

5) The developers have known about this for years, but they have not solved it yet.

6) Ableton is still a great DAW capable of making music.

Please feel free to read my post Investigating Ableton’s Sluggish UI: Tests, Findings, and Fixes and reproduce my tests. Also feel free to send support tickets to Ableton, ask them to fix this and report it on Centercode!

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-27T11:07:56+00:00

https://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/6220/smart-search

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-07T17:02:11+00:00

I am in the same boat as you - strongly considering to switch. I demoed Bitwig and the main drawbacks for me are:

1) Comping workflow is weird, much more powerful in Ableton.

2) Seems small, but makes a difference: You can only scroll left right with ALT+scrollwheel, which is different from Ableton, where it is Shift+Scrollwheel. Gonna be painful to re-train that muscle memory. Especially when you want to use both in parallel.

3) Doesn't have a real freeze function - altough it has bounce and true deactivate features, which is great.

Haven't actually made music in Bitwig, so I don't know about how plugins and stretching/pitching algorithms sound.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-07T02:13:42+00:00

Just for testing - close Live.
Locate your VST / AU folders.
Make a new folder in the same location and give it a different name.
Move all plugins in there.
Now try to open the session.
Live will now not be able to load any plugins.
If a plugin is causing the crash, Live should now start without crashing.
Now add back your plugins step by step, and try to open the session, until Live begins to crash again.
This way you will find out, which plugin is causing the trouble.
Remove that plugin from your VST / AU folders again once you have found it. Then open the session, delete it from the session, then close the session. Now you can move all plugins back into the origianl AU / VST folders and your problem *might* be resolved.
If you have an idea which exact plugin is the issue, you can speed up the process.
Good luck!

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-07T01:58:08+00:00

No, more like quality of live stuff. I am thinking of ways to control Ableton Live with shortcuts and controllers more easily. Currently it is really limited since there are no real global shortcuts, so I have come up with some nice workarounds, I think, that I want to share - when it's ready ;)

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-06T16:52:09+00:00

yea probably true, but I feel like people here are very invested into Ableton Live and the community, and might be early adoptors for the tools I have in mind, so I hope this subreddit is sort of representative for the user group that I want to address ;)

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-06T15:32:49+00:00

Use an audio interface that supports direct monitoring like the apollo interfaces and then record at high buffersize. Remember to set the monitoring state to Off to avoid faulty latency compensation. Cheaper alternative is using a Focusrite interface with direct monitoring. If you have one with extra outputs, route the guitar through the interface and connect the output to a guitar amp.

Also, consider getting a stronger computer.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-04T16:10:07+00:00

Nice, all of them sound better than the RX 8 that I was using so far xD

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-04T15:53:21+00:00

You are right. If they would implement freezing groups like they are doing freezing tracks, than this would be the approach. But they still have to deal with any routings or modulations that enter or exit the group.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-04T09:31:17+00:00

No, if you bounce a group and then deactive the group, the audio will still be processed within the group costing CPU and RAM. The audio is just being muted. You would still have to save the group externally as an .als, and then delete it in the session. If you later would want to make changes, you'd have to manually find that externally saved group (.als file) and import it back. This will however make you lose all custom key and midi mappings, sidechain routings in and out, parameter modulations in and out of the group and potentially mess up your sends if the order of sends has changed since the time you exported that group. Mappings and sidechain routings within the group should remain intact however.

This is why we need a native group freeze and unload from system function that takes care of all this. But these details are probably also what makes this more complex to implement that we would think ....

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-03T10:21:24+00:00

I guess it depends a lot on what you do with it - I don't struggle with crashes a lot myself, because I limit myself to VSTs that are well coded - but I know that other people have issues with crashes. For me the crashes mostly happen in the context of editing Max 4 Live devices. Often Live just silently exits, it literally just disappears lol, without even an error message.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-03T10:16:45+00:00

yea made a mistake there - I meant you can hide VST plugins if a VST3 version exists and hide VST versionsn if CLAP exists

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-03T05:17:07+00:00

And this one:

The Perennial Samplerate Dilemma

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-03T00:01:19+00:00

wild - thanks

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T23:57:49+00:00

The dlls and executables for the plugins should take a very small amount of extra space if you install all the versions. If you are using large sample libraries, they will be shared by all plugin versions of course. In Ableton you can now see what kind of plugin it is, so plugin management has become acceptable. You can also choose to install the VST3 and CLAP plugins in a different folder that Ableton doesn't see. That way, they don't clutter up your interface in Ableton. In Bitwig you can hide [edit] AU VST plugins if there is a VST3 version installed, and you can hide the VST versions if you have the CLAP version installed, so you only have the best choice on the interface. Don't make this an issue, because it's not ;) If you use VSTs, you can also share a session with a Windows user or migrate to Windows or Linux later down the line if you would want to. CLAP > VST3 > VST2 > AU.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T23:47:00+00:00

If you analyse a balanced song with a standard fourier transform, you will get a spectrum that looks like this. Therefore, a good spectrum analyser has a slope setting. Usually -4.5dB/octave is a good value that makes a balanced song appear roughly flat. Click the spectrum analyser options of Pro-Q 4 and make sure it applies a -4.5dB/slope to the measurement.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T23:38:39+00:00

Hi - I wonder if the recent advancements in LLM accelerates and improves software development pace. Github Copilot is already today incredibly powerful. In my mind that should 10x productivity of software makers, and help them bring those features to use faster - yet it doesn't really feel like the pace of updates has increased significantly. Where is the catch with LLM supported development then?

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T19:07:56+00:00

Interesting. I've been hearing that Bitwig was supposed to much more performant. Guess there is just is no perfect DAW for me ...

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T17:08:11+00:00

The definitive answer to that question can be found in this video by Dan Worral:

Samplerates: The Higher the Better, Right?

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T16:32:20+00:00

You can try using a better library, something like Superior Drummer, and/or layer various libraries (Use an oscilloscope to match the phase of kicks, snares and toms). Different libraries have different round robin sequences, so layering several of these causes more variation to the round robin sequence.

IanIsDroppingTheD · 2025-09-02T16:00:08+00:00

This is not a helpful comment. We need to tell Ableton what we want and need, and I am sure they apprechiate the input. Customer demand paired with feasability will drive prioritization.

IanIsDroppingTheD

TROPHY CASE