Playback issues

[weaselxr]

So I've recently been getting some issues while trying to playback my sequence. I go to hit play, and while it may work the first time, it only gets part of the way through before getting that beloved message of overloading. My buffer was already up to 1024, but I tried increasing it, but to no avail. After that initial message, the next time I go to play, nothing happens. It freezes for a little bit, sometimes with the spinning beachball, before my playback meter (the one under the processing meter) turns completely red. It doesn't even try to move the playhead. At that point, I can only hit stop, save, and quit. Although when I quit, the process never completely quits and I have to force quit it.

I recently incorporated using VE Pro in my workflow, so I moved all the instruments to be native in DP to see if that was the cause. No effect. Part way through the project, my monitors arrived (I had been using headphones on it before) so I hooked those up through an mbox2 and started working with them. These problems started occurring later that day. I tried using a Scarlett 2i2 thinking maybe my mbox was damaged or couldn't handle it. No effect. Changed the playback engine to be my headphones. No effect.

The problem started the second I created my second instance of Omnisphere. It's not a huge project. 9 tracks of omnisphere over 2 instances, 2 tracks in Kontakt, 4 in Stylus, 1 in Absynth, 1 in Battery, and 1 in RealRick, 3 instances of altiverb, 1 of guitar rig, and at no point are they all going at the same time or even that close. My processing meter never gets very high nor does the RAM or CPU in the activity monitor show it spiking. I've upped the buffer to 2048 and lowered it to 256. No effect.

If I disable the omnisphere instances, it seems to run ok. Running them on their own seems to make it crap out eventually. As of right now, 1 instance is using 8 channels and the other just has 1.

I tried moving omnisphere's library to my SSD drive since a lot of samples were coming from the same external. Didn't help.

I have a 2013 imac with a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 and 24GB RAM and have most samples on external drives going through USB 3.0 or thunderbolt.

Thanks,
Bobby

[weaselxr]

Of course as I was running tests of slowly enabling and disabling VIs while writing this, it has so far not crashed, but who knows how long it will last. Any experience with similar issues would be really helpful!

[emjayinla]

Not sure if this will help but I had a similar problem when I started incorporating VE Pro. I added a new track, tried to record the bus and got the beachball, redline, no output and a "disk too slow" message. Sometimes it would crash, sometime it wouldn't but I usually had to force quit it out.

In my case it was totally pilot error. I had routed the new bus to record onto itself. It took me a while (actually 2 days and a bunch of emails with VI) to realize the error message was sending me on a wild goose chase.

So, perhaps check your routing is what I can offer from my experience.