Two DP icons in Leopard dock

[bjornln]

Pardon me for taking this off-topic, but you say Time Machine destroyed your external drive? I've got 6 external drives, and three of them have died since I installed Leopard. Coincidence? I think not. I was able to revive two of them by reformatting them. But the 3rd? Dead as a doorknob. I wonder what's going on here. Is Spotlight the problem? I turned off Time Machine early, because it was taking too much processing time from my CPU, making the machine run like molasses. I noticed that Spotlight will access a large disk for days before it gets it all indexed.

Shooshie

Shoosh,

Just let the machine do it post-install stuff. It might take awhile. But afterwards its smooth sailing....
On my studio machine (G5 1.8 GHz with quite a few drives) it took about 32 hours until spotlight was done. afterwards... no problems.


/B

[bjornln]

My external drives are all firewire. My internal drives of course are serial ATA.

The ones that died are definitely the oldest. It could be that they were on their last legs, and Leopard's sudden demands for indexing and backing up just wore them out.

I've found in the past that a drive that will not boot on one Mac will sometimes work perfectly on another. I plan to plug them into my Powerbook and see if they'll still boot. If so, I'll reformat them and see if I can get them working again.

Shoosh,

Were the drives that croaked formated on a non-intel machine ?
Then that might be the problem... intel-machines use a different partition map scheme, and can probably get you into deep doo-doo if you won't reformat them.

So, what you might have (in reallity) is 1 drive that really crashed, and two drives that were just not formateed correctly for the new machine / leopard....

I not betting any money on this, but its a plausible explanation......


/B

[Alan Craig]

Were the drives that croaked formated on a non-intel machine ?
Then that might be the problem... intel-machines use a different partition map scheme, and can probably get you into deep doo-doo if you won't reformat them.

So, what you might have (in reallity) is 1 drive that really crashed, and two drives that were just not formateed correctly for the new machine / leopard...

I guess we're off topic a bit here (I still haven't been able to get a grip on the double icon problem), but the hard disk issue is a really important one too. There's no doubt that there is formatting and indexing problems with Time Machine and Apple have (at last) started to address the issue. The computer world has plenty to say about it.

Here's just a couple of dozens of links discussing this issue ••“ which is even closer to the hearts of audio recorders than most.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=11260

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306932

[bjornln]

I guess we're off topic a bit here (I still haven't been able to get a grip on the double icon problem)

If you hoover over the icons in the dock, you might get a clue to what it is / was....
Also, does one of the icons have a transparent questionmark on top of it ?


/B

[Shooshie]

I guess we're off topic a bit here (I still haven't been able to get a grip on the double icon problem), but the hard disk issue is a really important one too. There's no doubt that there is formatting and indexing problems with Time Machine and Apple have (at last) started to address the issue. The computer world has plenty to say about it.

Here's just a couple of dozens of links discussing this issue ••“ which is even closer to the hearts of audio recorders than most.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=11260

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306932

That's very interesting. I remember there was some reason why I turned off Time Machine, and now I remember it was because it gave me that "Unable to complete backup" error on some drive. After messing with it for a while, I intuitively turned it off. When Apple stuff malfunctions, you don't use it!

And that's just one more reason why I won't be turning it back on.

Shoosh

[tommymandel]

Interestingly, I just checked my "force Quit" window, and one of the "two" icons was showing as "not responding". So, I force quit it and it disappeared -

That (force quitting the non-responding of the 2 dP's) just worked for me on my MBP, thanks Alan!

Odd, that I'm still having this "2007 issue" although my situation is slightly different: If I select the "wrong" DP icon in the Application Switcher (with Command-Tab), Digital Performer is displayed as the active app to the immediate right of the Apple in the menu bar, but DP's windows don't display... Maybe it's because this is a 2007 MBP (Santa Rosa) although it is Snow Leopard's latest OS...10.6.6. (10j567

[carrythebanner]

Do you have the Digidesign Core Audio driver installed (/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/HAL/Digidesign CoreAudio.plugin), and also the Apple Software Synth enabled in DP (Setup menu > Interapplication MIDI)? I've seen what you're describing on my own system, and somehow or another discovered that connection. Not sure why it happens, but it appears to be harmless.

Interesting note: There are actually two executables inside the DP app bundle's Contents/MacOS folder: Digital Performer (the main DP executable) and DLSSoftSynth (for the Apple Software Synth). For whatever reason, when the Digi Core Audio driver is present, DLSSoftSynth appears as a regular app, rather than behind-the-scenes as usual. (The fact that both are within the same DP app bundle explains why "Show in Finder" on both of these dock icons reveal the same Digital Performer application.)

[tommymandel]

Wow, Banner! That totally explains it-in my system, I do have the Digi driver installed, for the rare occasions when I hook up my laptop to the 002R. And I've been using the Apple Software Synth lately for drafts.

PS. that would probably also explain why, when I'd force quit the "2nd DP" in Application Switcher, I'd have to reload an Apple Synth, sometimes called "DLS Music Device" and sometimes called "Apple Software Synth", not sure why...