Hey Leo, hey Community,
I’ve been having a bit of a problem with Ableset/Ableton for the past six months, and it’s been getting worse recently. During a show, Ableton randomly freezes (spinning rainbow wheel), which disables all controls, including play/pause and loops, and causes playback to run past STOP locators. Audio doesn’t drop out and keeps playing normally. This sometimes happens between songs while playback is paused, and sometimes during a song. Ableset shows “lost connection to Ableton” when this occurs.
At first it only happened once or twice during a 1.5-hour set. Last weekend, during a 45-minute festival set, it occurred every second song. Restarting Ableton or the MacBook doesn’t seem to make any difference either. I also tried reproducing the problem at home with the exact same setup, but everything works fine there.
Does anyone know whether this is caused by Ableton or by Ableset? Has anyone else experienced a similar issue?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I have shows coming up this weekend.
Setup:
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Ableton 12.4.3 Standard
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Ableset 2.7.5
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MacBook Pro M3 Pro, 18 GB RAM
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macOS Sequoia 15.7.7
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iConnectivity PlayAudio 12
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Hotone Pulze Control as MIDI controller
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MIDI program changes for Quad Cortex
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Lighting controlled via Show Buddy Active
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Ableton project: 15 GB, ~3000 bars and 300 tracks (tracks either have no plugins or are frozen), project sits on internal SSD
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CPU usage shows max 10%, RAM usage 13/18 GB
Hey @schmitt_nik, welcome to the forum!
I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues with Live freezing during playback! There might be a few reasons for this, but the simplest one you can check is how far you’re zoomed in on your Live project.
When you’re zoomed all the way out, Live has to render a lot of clips which can cause the UI to freeze. Unfortunately, their Control Surface API which AbleSet uses to communicate with Live is also running on the UI thread, so it freezes along with Live.
The simplest workaround is either zooming in so only one or two songs are visible at a time or switching to session view so the arrangement isn’t shown at all.
Could you try if that makes a difference? I’m looking forward to your reply!
Thanks for the super fast reply!
I actually read about that in a different thread, so I tried it today at home both ways, zoomed in showing only half a song, and also zoomed all the way out. Since I didn’t run into any problems during today’s tests, I can’t say yet whether it makes a difference. Not sure if it’s relevant, but I run Ableset in fullscreen, with Ableton running behind it (not visible on screen). I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.
Do you have any other suggestions I could try in the meantime?
Thanks!
Hey @schmitt_nik, unfortunately I don’t have any other suggestions for now. Did the issue occur again after zooming in? 
Hey Leo, I’ve tried it every day for several hours without any problems. Today at rehearsal it happened once while zoomed in (probably around 12 bars visible). I also lowered the buffer size from 512 to 64 yesterday, because of the performance/efficiency core thing I read about in a different thread.
I’m confident about the gigs tomorrow and Saturday, since it’s been running quite stable the last few days, but we’ll see. I’ll keep you updated.
Thanks again for your help!