Twilight Zone

[NYFC]

I had a couple of bizarre problems this week and I'm wondering if anyone has experienced anything like them.

1. After laying several MIDI parts down with a combination of hardware and virtual instrument, I began to play in another part and every note I played triggered a rhythm pattern. Holding down any note or chord would be heard as a repeating pattern. At first I though I must have accidentally turn on an arpeggiator on my keyboard, but that was not the case. I opened up the MIDI monitor in DP and it only showed the first note on input. If I recorded MIDI, it only recorded the notes I played and not all the notes I was hearing. Once this would start happening it would trigger this pattern on both virtual and hardware instruments. This happened on more than one project but has not happened in a new project I started several hours ago. Knock on wood.

2. I needed to make a click track for an extremely rubato piece where I might have one bar with quarter note clicks and the next with eighth or even sixteenth note clicks. On one particular bar, for no reason that I can discern, DP spat out a series of what sounded like 256th note clicks for a bar and then went back to normal. It didn't matter which resolution of click that bar was set for. I had to delete every previous click change and rebuild the click map from the beginning. That solved the problem but I can't figure out why it happened in the first place.

I've been using DP on and off for a couple of years now and I'm looking to make it my main DAW. I'd never encountered such weird behavior and I'm hoping someone had seen this and could say, "oh yeah, it's because of such and such. Do this and it won't happen anymore".

[Shooshie]

That has to be a corrupted file. There are no normal situations which one could predict would result in this behavior. I've had only a few corrupted files for DP in the many years I've used it, but when I did, the result was obnoxious and bizarre.

There are two possible fixes for it that I can think of:
1) Rebuild your virtual instruments. That means start from scratch with new instrument files, trash the old ones, and reconfigure them all.
2) Load the chunks into a new project. File/Load menu.

Actually, I'd probably start with the 2nd one. Just load it into a new project. If that doesn't fix it, then I don't know what the problem is. In all my years, I've only had one project that simply completely folded up on me, to the point that I was never able to open it again. The few that have been corrupted have usually been easy to fix by loading their chunks into a new project file. But what causes corrupted files? I have no idea. I just haven't seen it enough to figure out a pattern.

Another thing to consider is whether your buffer is large enough. If you've got lots of instruments, especially instruments which themselves are major loads, like Ivory Pianos, and you're running that on a buffer of 64 samples, then you may be encouraging some kind of strange behavior, but the normal behavior for that is simply to drop notes, not add them.

I can't think of other causes, except for user error, such as hidden tracks you may have forgotten about. Good luck with it.

Shoosh

[James Steele]

I'm glad you stopped by to help, Shoosh. To the OP... sometimes it is harder to get help without a descriptive subject header. I clicked this to see if it was OT about the TV show!

[Shooshie]

I'm glad you stopped by to help, Shoosh. To the OP... sometimes it is harder to get help without a descriptive subject header. I clicked this to see if it was OT about the TV show!

What if I told you it IS about the TV show? These people THINK they're in a forum, but in reality there is no escape from this place. They're doomed to answer the same questions over and over, forever, always thinking that things are changing, getting better, the information getting out, but... what they never realize is that it's the same day repeated, forever, in THE TWILIGHT ZONE!

Dwee-Deee-Dweee-Dooo, Dwee-Deee-Dweee-Dooo...



Shoosh

[NYFC]

But James, the header DID draw Shooshie in. Point taken though.

Shooshie- I retraced my steps with the first behavior and it seemed to start when I added a MAS VEP instance, but not right away. I copied the sequence in the same projects and all was well. I'll have to go back and check a couple other projects because I think it happened more than once this week. I was battling a deadline and was a bit sleep deprived.

Anyway thanks for your help both on this topic and others.

[mikehalloran]

...I was battling a deadline and was a bit sleep deprived...

A major source of inspiration for many of us.

[NYFC]

...I was battling a deadline and was a bit sleep deprived...

A major source of inspiration for many of us.

Amen to that!

It drives my wife crazy that I often will wait until what she considers to be the last minute to begin work on a project. I've had to explain that the time it takes to do a project will always expand into the amount of time allotted to it. If I start too early, I seem to futz around indecisively for days and days. Procrastination forces me to commit! At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.