Fixing Ableton stuck on “Intializing Application” after macOS Update

After updating to the newest mac OS version I suffered with very long loading times of Ableton Live. Unfortunately I made the mistake to update too many things at one, as I also increased the Ableton Live version I was using to the latest one (2 minor versions increase).

With the latest Ableton version the application did not even reach its splash screen so It was very hard for me to even figure out what the problem was.

I downgraded Ableton to the old version I was using as I luckily found this nice website: https://ableton-live.netlify.app/ where you can basically download any of the past Ableton versions from their CDN.

Back on my old Ableton version the splash screen appeared at least so I could see that the application was stuck on the “Initializing Application” Process.

How to investigate this?

I googled around in several forums and finally found the “Log.txt” file, which is basically a quite verbose file containing everything that happens in Ableton.

/Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 11.0.12/Log.txt

While looking through the log file I identified a 2 minute gap between timestamps. The log messages between this time were


2023-03-10T18:48:17.017103: info: Audio In Out: OnArchitecturesAdded finished
2023-03-10T18:53:17.029184: info: LMidiIO: Error in MIDIClientCreate: 268435460

From some other forums I still had in mind, that ableton’s startup time, as well as issues with it are often related with the MIDI Setup of your mac.

I followed some hints given, to identify if your MIDI setup is broken in a way:

Open the Audio-Midi Setup Application on your mac

Within the Windows Tab open the Midi Studio

If this process takes ages as well its already a sign that your setup is corrupt

Ultimately I ended up with an error message telling me that “The MIDI server can’t be opened”.

This error message led me to the following apple support thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252269615

So here’s what I came up with to solve the problem

I checked for any drivers installed under /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers and deleted them

I deleted the settings-file of Audio Midi Setup via rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.audio.audiomidisetup.plist

I rebooted my mac

After that I could open the MIDI Studio again and Ableton Live was also booting up fast again 🥰

Hope this helps if you have similar issues

How to investigate this?

Using Tailwind with twin.macro