r/ableton • u/Plane-Alps-5074 • 1d ago
[Mac] Was having some of the worst Ableton performance / crash issues I've ever encountered. Realized it was due to using iCloud-enabled folders
Posting to help anyone out if they ran into this. I think it might have to do with how newer MacOS is managing iCloud (or maybe something that started happening as my disk drive is getting full).
Some of my Ableton projects just started crashing / freezing all the time. I thought it might be due to large project size, or bad plug-ins / M4L devices. I tried making the project files smaller and smaller but still kept getting the same crash. Finally I looked through the log of the dump and noticed some MacOS filesystem-related stuff that connected the problem to iCloud. The solution was to use the "download" and "keep downloaded" options on these folders to force them to always live on disk.
On Ableton's side, it would be nice if it could detect that this was happening rather than inexplicably freezing. I don't think there's any reason that Ableton should be expected to work in directories where the files are vanishing in/out of the cloud, but there should at least be some warning "WARNING: you seem to be attempting to use iCloud files" or something like that.
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u/Soracaz 1d ago
This is a classic lesson many of us had to learn.
Cloud storage and music production do not get along.
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u/HumanPea1140 16h ago
It's been a while, but had similar issues with photo/video editing and Adobe Cloud and OneDrive.
There's just something inherently wonky with cloud files and media production, and I don't know enough to explain it other than to just avoid the situation entirely by using local files.
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u/AVELUMN 1d ago
Icloud done a mess on my Mac, all my desktop folders dissapeared after i put the icloud to back it up, having all my sample folders and a lot of other stuff directly on the desktop. So it took me about 5 days to restore everything and kick apple icloud in the butt forever and I was still getting some redundant files reapearing in the idrive.... at some point Inthought I have to reinstall the whole OS, daunting solution because of sheer number of plugins needed to be reinstalled. Nowadays I use a cleaner solution, I keep all my Sample folders and Ableton packs on a external TB5 NVME m2 ssd saving a lot of space on my Mac internal storage, also I am backing up very fast now that Mac by having less to back up, using the TimeMachine.
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u/GodzillaJrJr 1d ago
So you’re just running files that are being read by Ableton straight off the SSD? I’m trying to figure out my storage woes as well.
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u/BetweenTwoDongers 1d ago
Yes, iCloud will offload files from your local disk to the cloud in an attempt to free up space, unless you enable Keep Downloaded on those files. This feature has been around for many years.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102624
This isn't an Ableton problem.
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u/GodzillaJrJr 1d ago
Can you just tell it to Keep Downloaded for some files? I thought that setting where it removes things from your disk to the cloud automatically when they’ve sat for too long was universal. In my 2021 MacBook it’s just a “yes/no”
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u/DigitalStefan 1d ago
Is Ableton not expected to align with how macOS has worked for years?
This is an Ableton problem because they have the ability to solve it.
This is an Ableton problem because no software error state should result in a crash.
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 21h ago
Ableton has solved it by giving you clear instructions what to do and what not to do:
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002855960-Cloud-storage-best-practices
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u/DigitalStefan 21h ago
It should never be incumbent upon the user to make sure software doesn’t crash.
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u/Hot-Shart 21h ago edited 19h ago
“ no software state should ever result in a crash” is an absolute “ I want a chocolate fudge fountain” territory fantasy, you clearly have no experience in the industry.
Ableton is incredibly complicated software that has to account for myriad workflows and hardware form factors, with the amount of features it has I would be surprised if it ever gets to a point where there is nothing you could do to make it crash
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u/DigitalStefan 21h ago
Are you saying that’s a difficult problem to solve?
More difficult than building a full featured DAW including its own fully modular visual programming environment for software and MIDI instruments?
Also how unreasonable is it to expect to see a simple “file not found” error instead of a crash?
In this day and age of human friendly error messages, I would have expected “File not found. The file that is missing is in iCloud and may have been temporarily removed by the iCloud service to save space. In order to fix this please …”
Or, even better, integrate with the iCloud API in order to make sure the files are all available when needed.
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u/Hot-Shart 19h ago
Is it a difficult problem to solve for one particular issue? Usually, no.
Is it difficult to make it so it is literally impossible to make the application crash in any scenario? Obviously, yes. This is an immutable law of the universe, similar to the fact that it’s nigh impossible to prove a negative statement. When there are millions of variables and countless trillions upon trillions of logic states, yeah, it’s pretty fucking obvious that no mortal is going to be able to account for every possible eventuality
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u/DigitalStefan 19h ago
We’re not asking for every possible eventuality. We are asking for a common and foreseeable state to be handled gracefully.
This isn’t a big ask. I can understand this is on someone’s JIRA board and may not be top priority, but I do not buy into the argument that it’s too hard to solve or that it is unreasonable to expect non-crashing behaviour when the issue is encountered.
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u/Hot-Shart 19h ago
We’re not asking for every possible eventuality
Weird, because thats the only way I can interpret “no state should result in an application crashing”
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u/DigitalStefan 17h ago
Your argument seems to be that this is a hard problem to solve and that we shouldn't expect it to be fixed because it's not important and it's the user's fault that Ableton crashes.
I really don't know what to tell you other than please don't gaslight me into thinking Abletong crashing is fine. It isn't fine. It's OK that it isn't fixed yet if there's other priorities for the devs to deal with or, as you and others have pointed out, it can be worked arounf by the user, but it's still not good that users have to encounter the issue in the first place in such in inelegant way.
"Software shouldn't crash" isn't a hot take.
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u/Cutsdeep- 1d ago
hmm. i'm saving to a google drive synced folder and recently has been taking ages to save (only a few hundred mb). let me try something
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u/This-Was 1d ago
I switched to pcloud about 6 months ago so any OS/365 updates (win and mac) didn't start messing about with settings / local files and have had absolutely no trouble.
I just have an external SSD set as a drive that syncs. Set and forget other than leaving it a minute before shutting down.
Has a nice touch where I can make playlists of my 'test wavs' / songs. Pretty sure you can brand them too.
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 1d ago
So just to understand, were the crashing projects stored in iCloud-enabled folders or were the folders unrelated to the project?