Ableton 12 crashing with komplete kontrol

Hi, and thanks for the added info.

I skimmed your answers, and my first gut feeling is maybe there's a dodgy VST instrument or effect getting its dirty fingers in the works. Here's my suggestion, but you'll probably want to see what others say too.

1. If Ableton Live is running, shut it down.
2. Start KK in standalone, then review all of your VST2 folders in KK settings and make sure you don't have any odd ones sneaking in there. Make sure that each folder in the settings matches an actual folder on your hard drive.
3. Check for the VST3 folder. There is no settings for it; it's fixed at C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 so just make sure that folder exists.
4. Then force a rescan in KK.
5. Then shut down KK and fire up Live.
6. Check the VST2 and VST3 folders for Live like you did for KK.
7. Get Live to rescan.
8. See if the crashes continue.

I'm at the edge of my knowledge here though, so anybody else, your contribution will be appreciated.

Good luck @Stefan DA

Adding @PoorFellow and @mykejb in case they can think of something or give you better guidance than I can.

I'm still thinking you have a particular VST (either an instrument or an effect) that is mucking things up.

Here's my next suggestion. Your mileage may vary, so back up your entire computer before you start messing around with settings and folders. Also remember that you should not rename any folders while the host that uses them is running. So shut down KK and Live before doing any renames. And also be sure to do a full scan all over again after renaming any folder.

I'll number these, just to give you an order you can try things in.

1. Check on KK Standalone's VST2 folder concatenation, and compare it to the concatenation in Live's settings. If one or both lists is long, I'd take pictures of each one and see which one is different.

Here's what I'm getting at: It's Live that fails, right? So maybe your configuration for Live has an extra VST2 library in there. If so, I would physically have a look at that folder and see what's in it. If there are a lot of plugins in that folder, I'd consider renaming it and then making a duplicate-but-empty version of it with the original folder name. Then see if Live still crashes.

2. Do the same check for the VST3 folders listed in Live's "VST3 Custom Folder" setting. Most hosts don't let you "add" custom folders to the VST3 concatenation, but Live does, so there's always a chance you have one in there and that's giving Live a belly ache.

Levelset: Now you should be down to this: You've checked to see if Live has anything DIFFERENT than KK standalone, and you've either found no differences or you've made them the same (1 and 2 above). The next thing to check on (I would think) is whether or not there's a VST2 plugin that is causing a problem for Live but not for KK standalone.

The easiest way to do this is to completely remove all VST2 plugins and then retest. And the easiest way to do THAT is to go through each folder listed in the plugin concatenations (after 1 and 2 above, the concatenation list should be the same now between KK standalone and Live, right?) and perform the steps in "1" above. That is, rename each VST2 folder, then create a new EMPTY folder with the original folder name.

Here's why I suggest that: It's the least destructive thing to do, and it's the fastest way to do it. It's least destructive because it forces KK and Live (and any other host you may have that uses those folders) to find the VST3 version of all plugins, and to never even see the VST2 plugins. It's also non-destructive because you can re-add all of your plugins in any given folder by just renaming the empty folder and the original folder with the plugins back.

3. If removing all VST2 plugins fixes the situation and stops Live from crashing, now you can decide whether to slowly add your VST2 plugins back and see which one starts making Live crash again…or you could decide to just not use VST2 plugins anymore.

If removing all VST2 plugins does NOT make a difference, and Live still crashes, then you can re-add your VST2 plugins just by renaming the folders back. And then maybe go through that same exercise with your VST3 plugins.

============

All of this work would be a major undertaking, and it would be more than a mild hassle. But if your crashes are happening because of a bad plugin, you will surely find it by methodically removing and then slowly re-adding your plugins.

And if you find it, then you can decide whether or not to re-install that plugin, leave it out, find an alternate that does the same thing (who doesn't have 18 different reverbs?), or get in touch with the maker of that plugin.

One last thing: 32-Bit plugins are on their way out, along with VST2 plugins. So when I went through this exercise, I went one step further and just left all of my VST2's out of my configurations, and I also made sure that there were no 32-Bit plugins still present in any configuration either.

Now of course, this makes it more challenging to deal with older projects that would now not find their VST2 and/or 32-Bit plugins. THAT I can deal with. Crashes are hard-stops.

Good luck!