AbleSet "waiting for Ableton to Start"

General
1

Hi everyone,

I am experiencing an issue where AbleSet completely fails to connect to Ableton Live 12 after my Mac reboots. The weird part is that it works flawlessly right after a clean installation, but as soon as the computer restarts, it stops working entirely and simply displays “waiting for Ableto to Start” and the “open last project” in the rectangle.

My Setup:

  • OS: macOS Sequoia 15.7.7
  • AbleSet Version: v3.1.4
  • Ableton Version: Live 12
  • User Account Path: /Users/musicsuite/

Symptoms:

  • AbleSet gets stuck on “Waiting for Ableton to start”.
  • Some options in the gear icon are completely greyed out i cannot “open ableset in browser” “open Ableset in a floating window” “fetching license” or “open settings”
  • Navigating to http://localhost:8200 or 127.0.0.1:8200 in a browser results in “Page cannot be reached.”
  • This issue does not happen on my other Mac running macOS 14.8.9 (Sonoma), only on this macOS 15 machine after a reboot.

What I Have Already Tried:

  1. Clean Installation: Deleted the app, cleared out the Remote Scripts folder, and reinstalled. It worked for exactly one day until a reboot.
  2. Permissions Check: Verified that AbleSet has Full Disk Access. Firewall is turned completely off, and there are no VPNs or network filters active
  3. File Inspection: Checked ~/Library/Application Support/AbleSet/.
    • Attempted to change the port to 8300 in the settings JSON.
    • Noticed that "preferredNetwork" was completely blank ("") in the internal configuration. Forcing it to "127.0.0.1" in the text file still did not unfreeze the app menu.
  4. Launch Order: Attempted to force-quit the app and launch Ableton Live 12 before starting AbleSet, but the app engine remains frozen.
  5. I was able to “deactivate machine”. But then I also performed the clean install.

Has anyone seen this persistent reboot-freeze on macOS 15, or is there a specific background cache I need to clear? Ideally, I wouldn’t update to Tahoe. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

Hey @Travis, welcome to the forum!

Thanks for the detailed writeup!

Before anything else, let’s try undoing the manual config edits.

1. preferredNetwork expects an interface identifier, not an IP address. The value it takes is something like en0 or en1. An empty string is the normal default and means “pick automatically”, so a blank value there wasn’t a symptom. Setting it to 127.0.0.1 isn’t a valid value.

2. There’s no port setting in that file. AbleSet runs on port 80 by default, and if port 80 is already taken it looks for a free port starting at 3000 and shows the resulting address in the status window. So localhost:8200 was never going to respond regardless — that test doesn’t tell us much. Adding a port key by hand won’t change anything either, and if the JSON ended up malformed it could stop the app from starting at all.

The cleanest way to reset both: quit AbleSet, move the entire ~/Library/Application Support/AbleSet/ folder to your Desktop (moving it rather than deleting it keeps it as a backup), then launch AbleSet again. That forces a fresh default config without reinstalling the app.

If it still doesn’t come up after that, a few checks specific to your setup:

Local Network permission. There’s a privacy permission that’s separate from Full Disk Access and from the firewall. Have a look at System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network and make sure AbleSet is enabled there.

What’s actually listening. If you’re comfortable in Terminal, this one command tells us a lot:

lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN | grep -i ableset

If it returns nothing, the server really isn’t starting. If it returns a line, the port number in it is the address you should be opening in your browser.

And to see what’s actually happening under the hood, could you please create a Log Package? Ideally reproduce the issue first, and then create the package so the logs capture the failed startup. You can create a log package by opening AbleSet’s icon tray, clicking the gear icon, and then selecting “Create Log Package”. To send the files, you can upload them to AbleSet’s support inbox. If “Create Log Package” happens to be greyed out too, let me know and we’ll look for a workaround.

I’m looking forward to your reply!

3

Thanks for a response! I did quickly realize chat GPT and gemini were not helping with the little code edits. So I simply stopped messing with things I didnt understand.

Local network permissions - confirmed it is there. I toggled on and off. checked again, no change.

I tried the terminal command, simply copied that and put it in terminal, correct? No response. no port number listed or anything. HOWEVER ableset did something different, it said something like “connecting”, it was very quick. Then followed with “waiting for ableton to load -default file-”. I opened one of my files and Ableset worked as it should! I knew it was too good to be true - nothing actually changed. So I did a restart and the same non responsive issues are repeating.

I created and uploaded two logs. One, i checked “yes” on include files. the other, I checked “no” on included files.

I hope those help you see under the hood. Appreciate any advice again and thanks for your time!

4

Hey @Travis,

Thanks a lot for sending those over and for running the terminal check.

We’ll dig into the logs and get back to you as soon as we know what’s going on.