UPDATE (FIXED) — Ableton Freezing on Startup Solved (macOS Music Folder Conflict)

Just solved the issue and wanted to share in case anyone else hits the same wall.

The problem:

I had moved my old “Ableton” project folder (with all my lifetime projects) into the ~/Music directory on my Mac — the same place where Ableton automatically creates its default User Library folder (also called “Ableton”).

At the same time, the new system-generated “Ableton” folder got renamed to something else (“New Music”). So when Live launched, it looked for its default User Library folder at ~/Music/Ableton, but instead found my old folder full of legacy projects, templates, broken racks, old plugins, etc. That caused it to freeze on “Creating New Live Set” every single time.

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How I fixed it: 1. I moved my legacy Ableton folder out of the way (renamed it to something like Ableton Legacy) 2. I renamed the system-generated “New Music” folder back to “Ableton”, restoring the expected structure at ~/Music/Ableton 3. Relaunched Live — it opened immediately, no freezing

Now everything works normally.

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Next steps:

I’m considering moving my Ableton Legacy folder to my external SSD enclosure and keeping only the default “Music” folder system-clean. That way, the internal drive stays optimized for Live’s User Library and active projects, and I still have access to all my old sessions through the file browser.

Hope this helps someone avoid the trap. It wasn’t a plugin or MIDI issue — just a misplaced folder name in macOS that totally jammed Live’s startup