jit.gl.texture receiving bangs causes crashes in Max for Live
I've been working on a set of Max for Live devices that rely heavily on JavaScript. Recently, I've been having some issues where the adding the devices to an empty Live set will instantly crash Live. Sometimes, Live will display an error that says "A serious program error has occurred. Live will shut down after this message box is closed." In other cases, Live just abruptly quits.
After doing some bisection testing, I found that the crashes were specifically being triggered by jit.gl.texture objects receiving bangs on load. Opening the Ableton crash dumps in WinDbg revealed that the last instruction preceding the crash was always jitlib!jit_handle_size_set . This led me on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to figure out if the issue had to do with initialization order, GL context creation, etc.
I noticed the problem would persist for a while, including across rebooting my computer, and then it would seemingly "fix itself," which led me to suspect that it was being caused by a file somewhere on disk rather than anything stored in memory.
I thought that the issue was perhaps being caused by the Max's database files for Live (at AppData\Roaming\Cycling '74\Max 8\Database or AppData\Roaming\Cycling '74\Max 9\Database, depending on your Max version). Deleting the files in these folders seemed to fix the issue, but now it's cropped up again. I initially posted this when I thought I had a working solution in case it was helpful to anyone else, but now I think I'm just going to submit a bug report to C74 support.
max version? we think we've fixed a crash on windows with that crash signature for 9.1.4, but there could always be more. If you are on 9.1.4 then yes please contact support with files to reproduce.
Hey Rob! I'm testing in parallel with both Live 11/Max 8 and Live 12/Max 9. Just checked, and I'm on 9.0.10 in the case of Max 9.
Here's my specific version info. In both cases I'm using bundled Max, not standalone.
Live 11/Max 8
Live 11.3.43 (Build: 2025-10-06_b466d4f56c)
Max version 8.5.8 (2948a362b30) (x64 windows)
Live 12/Max 9
Live 12.3.8 (Build: 2026-04-20_2bb671540a)
Max version 9.0.10 (5c961a19adb (x64 windows)
A couple questions:
Is 9.1.4 available as a bundled Max version with Live 12 now?
Is there any suggested workaround/fix for this crash in older versions? The fact that it works intermittently, then goes bad for a while, then starts working again gives me some hope that it's a matter of deleting a database or cache file or something similar.
ok yes you will want to test out 9.1.4 and see if that fixes your crashes. As far as I know 9.1.4 will be bundled with Live 12.4 and that will be released "soon".
I'm guessing the database resetting is simply masking the actual issue.
Got it, thanks Rob - I'll test Live 12.4 / Max 9.1.4 as soon as available.
Do you have any suggestions as to how to reliably get Live/Max out of the crash-prone state when this comes up? For the time being, I'm cycling through various combinations of the following steps, which seem to sort of help sometimes, but it doesn't feel totally reliable
- Delete the contents of the Database folder
- Open Live, add any standard (non-SIGN/e) Max for Live device, e.g. an empty Max MIDI Effect, click the three dots in the top right of the device UI and click Edit in Max. This rebuilds the databases.
- Go to C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Max 9\Max for Live Devices (or C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Max 9\Max for Live Devices) and delete any folders it contains.
- Reboot the computer.
Even for development work on these devices, it's a bit painful to get effectively locked out of being able to work on them until the crash "fixes itself."