Crash logs are generated by the Diagnostic Tool described here in the manual.
We use Crash logs to learn what happened when FL Studio or a plugin crashed. They contain a snapshot of FL Studio run-time data and settings at the time of the crash. While you are welcome to look at them to see what they contain, they are not intended to be understood by customers but rather developers and technical support staff.
However, it is very important to send them to Technical Support Windows or Technical Support macOS with a description of what happened. When submitting your Crash log to Technical Support, please give a detailed step-by-step description of what you were doing just prior to the crash. This can significantly speed up the diagnostic process. If you can replicate the crash, let us know the steps.
Finally, make sure that FL Studio is up-to-date. We fix a lot of issues with each update, so your bug may be fixed already. Download the latest version here.
Crash logs are saved to the following folders:
Windows:
C:\Users\[USER]\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Support\Logs\Crash
C:\Users\[USER]\Documents\Image-Line\data\FL Studio\Support\Logs\Crash (for older installations)
MacOS:
Finder > Documents > Image-Line > FL Studio > Support > Logs > Crash
NOTE: It's often useful to zip the entire Crash folder and upload that, as prior crashes can be useful for our support team to diagnose problems.
This applies to all Crashes:
Don't continue editing your project after FL Studio or a plugin has crashed. Even if FL Studio continues working as FL Studio will be in a faulty state and anything added or changed in the project could corrupt its data.
Immediately save your project to a new version (Ctrl+N), then restart FL Studio.
When you report a crash, give us as much information as possible. It is hard to fix issues that we can’t reproduce so exact steps are recommended:
Below are some commonly occurring crashes with known fixes, that you can check before creating a topic on the tech support forums:
FL Studio won't open / FL Studio won't start
If you are using any 3rd party plugins in the project, skip to the 'Third party plugin crashes' section of this article.
If the crash log says ‘Out of memory’, you are using more RAM than what is available in your system. You can either reduce the memory usage of the project, or install more memory on your system.
In case you still use an older FL Studio version, make sure you use FL Studio in 64-bit, as the 32-bit version is able to use significantly less memory.
32-bit was discontinued with FL Studio 20.9 (32-bit plugins still work as usual, only 32-bit FL Studio was discontinued).
If you are using any 3rd party plugins in the project, you can remove them with the help of the Diagnostic tool.
A copy of the project will be created without the crashing plugin.
For information on how to prevent this in the future, refer to the 'Third party plugin crashes' section of this article.
FL Studio crashes silently, no sign of a crash message, but strange things may start happening in the interface.
Save your project as a new version (important, so you do not save potentially corrupted data in your main project) and restart FL Studio.
FL Studio just closes, that’s it.
There is not much that can be done at this moment, if it crashes silently or directly to the desktop, as there is no trace of the crash. You can still contact us in technical support however:
Third party plugins can sometimes cause FL Studio to crash. There can be many reasons for this, as they are independent programs being developed by someone else. Ideally, a plugin developer follows the VST/2/3/AU plugin specifications strictly, but this is not always the case. In this case there may be graphical, audio or other issues (crashing) with a plugin. If a plugin is old, obscure or no longer actively developed, encountering problems becomes more likely.
If you suspect that a 3rd party plugin is causing a crash, you can often see the plugin name somewhere in the crash log, but this is not always the case.
To fix the issue, make sure that your plugins are up-to-date. It is important that plugins are updated, as the developers constantly fix bugs.
If the plugin is up-to-date and you still experience crashes, please make sure that you reported the issue to the developer of the plugin.
We can’t look under the hood of 3rd party plugins, so the developers need to be notified as well. This is really important for keeping FL Studio stable and functional when working with 3rd party plugins.
For more solutions, please refer to these links:
Problems with VST / AU Plugins in FL Studio and Solutions using the Wrapper Settings
After these steps, you can create a topic about the plugin crash on the tech support forum. We will investigate commonly occurring issues with 3rd party plugins.
Please update the plugin, crashes are common if you are not using the latest version of Arcade.
These crashes are ones where you won't get an FL Studio crash log window, but a Windows error dialog or an Apple crash log. You can report these to tech support as well, alongside with any relevant information about how and when the crash occurred.
If the crash doesn't fit into any of the categories listed in this article, you can just go ahead and report to technical support.
Image-Line Support team