Reliable DAW as Rewire slave in Ableton

[oneway]

Reaper, on the other hand, is so full of bugs

I’m not a fan of REAPER but to be fair I don’t think it’s “full of bugs” so much as its features sometimes don’t work well together. It’s basically designed by committee in the Feature Request forum. Back when I used to use it, it was downright amazing how many features were just implemented literally as requested without considering how that might cripple another existing feature.

I do agree though that if Live is crashing with plug-ins it’s likely due to an issue with the plug-ins. Sometimes using two specific plug-ins together will crash a DAW. I’ve seen plug-ins not let go of memory properly, plug-ins cause graphical issues in other plug-ins on the same track, there’s quite a long list of things that can go wrong just between plug-ins.

From what I've read online it seems to be pretty common problem with Live that other users have as well.

@djmino02 if you look on forums it would appear that every single DAW is the most unstable with 3rd party plug-ins. This stuff is hard to troubleshoot, its hard to identify incompatibilities with plug-ins, and with a lot of plug-ins it’s hard to pinpoint what’s going wrong. It’s only natural that everyone blames their DAW, and nobody pops online to post “my plug-ins work!”

The first step I would recommend is learn how to read a crash report. It tells you what plugin is crashing the DAW. If you see one name come up over and over, either update the plugin, tell the dev, or stop using the plugin.

[djmino02]

Yeah. Probably so. I have done that to a certain extent and I could never pinpoint anything to a specific plugin. As I recall it would say the crash was due to something totally unrelated, or seemingly unrelated perhaps.

[oneway]

it would say the crash was due to something totally unrelated, or seemingly unrelated perhaps.

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out. There’s one plugin I have that crashes whenever I add it during a session with a lot of other plug-ins. I figured it out after a while but the crash report just said “Ableton.live.engine” was crashing, which seems weird because I’m using Studio One, not Ableton

[W23]

FWIW Renoise is supposed to be an extremely stable ReWire slave. Though, like Reason Rack, they have a VST sampler (Redux) that works just fine inside of any DAW as a plugin. I’m late to this conversation, so I’m not exactly sure why one would still want to use ReWire these days. I used to record my own loops into live using Reason’s synths and drum machines. That was 2004 -2008, when plugins were still kind of a PITA to deal with. I tried doing it again with Reason a couple of years ago, and found it to kind of clunky. It’s just more effort than it’s worth. The CPU spikes were a real turn off, and I don’t remember them being that much of an issue in 2008. I don’t think ReWire has really been updated much in the last 15 years, if at all. This is just my feeling. Maybe it has. My last experience with it wasn’t all that great. Maybe try the Renoise demo as a ReWire slave. They have a really usable demo, and Renoise costs just a little more than Reaper.

[drdriller]

Live is my favorite daw for many reason, but it's not really a robust software while i've never seen reaper bug in any situation.

I've used Live since v.7, crashed on me twice, both times when testing beta plugins. Never ran into a bug. Reaper, on the other hand, is so full of bugs that most people who actually try to use it give up on it after wasting months getting it to do the mundane tasks that simply work out of the box in other DAWs.

i don't heavily use reaper, just as a vst fx rack on live situation, but i've never seen it hang.

i often use live, it sometimes crash, not really often but it can happen.

By the way each time i switch to my bluetooth speaker, if i forget to disconnect it before launching live, it will bug with a error message : "Asio can't be set to 8000 hz", then the only way to get it working again is to first launch reaper, change the asio output, close reaper and launch live again.

[djmino02]

I'm not familiar with Renoise. I may have to check it out.

I'm not a huge fan of how Reaper's Rewire integrates with Ableton yet. It took me a while to figure out to the routing but I did get it to work and Reaper is capable of hosting VST's in Rewire Slave mode which is what I am trying to do.

I'm hoping that Reaper can better handle hosting the plugins than Ableton Live.

I did get some glitches with the audio, notes sticking, and one plugin displayed incorrectly momentarily in Reaper for some reason which was odd. I had the plugin set as Mini V and it displayed Matrix 12V for a bit. No crashes though which is a relief.

[djmino02]

Had another issue with Reaper in Rewire slave mode where the last parameter of the plugin I clicked on would drop to lowest value on left of the knob when pressing the space bar to start/stop. For example, Filter Frequency knob would drop to lowest value when pressing the space bar. Anyone else have this issue?

[antic604]

Had another issue with Reaper in Rewire slave mode where the last parameter of the plugin I clicked on would drop to lowest value on left of the knob when pressing the space bar to start/stop. For example, Filter Frequency knob would drop to lowest value when pressing the space bar. Anyone else have this issue?

90%+ of people here told you to drop that idea, to figure out which plugins are crashing Live and why or to use some kind of VST wrapper, that will perhaps be more stable.



(yes, I'm aware it's probably someone else who said that, but it's true nonetheless)

[teilo]

Well, you can always try Bitwig, and just give up on Ableton. At least there, if a plugin crashes, it doesn't bring down the DAW. But I agree that Ableton is not known to have problems with VSTs as compared to any other DAW, and I would look at your setup further.

[djmino02]

I got FL studio to work in Rewire slave mode. It works much better than Reaper IMHO.

I had to get a link from someone on the forum to get it to work if anyone is interested let me know.

It still doesn't function anywhere near as good as Reason 10 and below though, which would sync up perfectly with Ableton Live.

However the stability of the plugins is much better it seems than Ableton so that's a big plus but I have yet to really push the limits like I have with Ableton.

Now I just have to figure out the routing of midi and audio in FL which is not that intuitive apparently. I hope it's not as difficult as routing Maschine in Ableton.

Also, not i'm not sure what a VST wrapper is. If it's a standalone application and not an actual VST plugin I would be interested but the VST plugins are an issue in my version of Live at least.

[liquidsound]

Well, you can always try Bitwig, and just give up on Ableton. At least there, if a plugin crashes, it doesn't bring down the DAW. But I agree that Ableton is not known to have problems with VSTs as compared to any other DAW, and I would look at your setup further.

I rather give up on a plug-in than changing a DAW.
My Ableton is quite a rock but after all I own pretty solid VST so far.
I had problems due to working with other intensive CAD applications while running Ableton and I had several freezing with BWS as well.
It’s a computer reality and no one is immune.

[djmino02]

I don't know what the deal is with Ableton. Yesterday I was running maybe 3 plugins in Live, if that, and the CPU meter thing was bugging out for no apparent reason causing audio glitches and stuff. Meanwhile, FL Studio is seemingly unaffected. I check the PC taskbar and Ableton is using like 1% of the CPU.

[djmino02]

Turns out FL Studio rewire isn't for me either. It's a tossup whether Reaper or FL Studio works better or not in Slave mode.

I do know that both Reaper and FL Studio handle the CPU usage way better than Ableton, for whatever reason in my setup at least.

The issues I had w/ Reaper were w/ dropouts that may be attributed to the buffer size in Ableton, but it did sync up to Ableton tempo as I recall.

The issues I had w/ FL Studio was that it would not seem to sync up to the tempo very well. There was definitely a considerable amount of latency. I would have to hit play and then wait for the next bar to come around before it would play somewhat in sync. Also had some phasing issues when using samples in FL triggered by Ableton.

Is anyone familiar with Cakewalk in Rewire Slave mode? I'm curious how it could handle hosting VST's in slave mode? I noticed that Cakewalk is free now? That's pretty cool! It has comping too and some other features it looks like that are pretty cool like snapping to dotted notes.

[dunkelheitd]

I have found that Cockos Reaper does quite well with ReWire in Host or Slave mode with Ableton Live.
Reaper is a very well built and supported DAW.
Another candidate would be Presonus Studio One. I would suggest a Magix product but I don't find they play well outside their own sandbox.

[dunkelheitd]

You could also perhaps use a simpler VST host like Mulab, Forte, Maschine studio etc. that would manage the VST plugins stable.