Mixing Board maxes out?

[Lawson.]

I'm setting up a gigantic orchestral template (~600 MIDI tracks) and it seems I have maxed out the Mixing Board. It won't let me scroll horizontally, and the only way to see more tracks is to pop it out into it's own window and drag the sides of it to stretch it out. Even this, though, seems to stop stretching maybe 100 tracks in.

I have all my VIs and Auxes in the V-Rack (which when viewing that works fine), but I want to have individual control over each MIDI track and have busses in the main mixing board as well.

On a side note, is it possible to have an Aux track in your V-Rack and also have one in your main mixing board, both controlling the same stereo bundle? I was trying to figure that out and then stumbled across the mixing board problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Lawson

[bayswater]

Presumably you don't have to see all 600 tracks at once. So you can use the track selector in the mixer with along with track folders or groups. If you put the tracks in folders in a way that makes sense for mixing, you can keep the track selector open when mixing and have it display the tracks in a folder with a single click. For more flexibility you can group track and clicking one of them in the track selector will show or hide the group in the mixer.

[Shooshie]

I'm currently working in a file with about 60 chunks, some of which have over 150 tracks. I think the largest has 200 tracks. These are MIDI tracks, with very few audio (just a few bounces). I don't see any kind of slowdown with this setup... yet. Automation and thick continuous data are all working fine. That's not the same as having 600 tracks open, but it's still a lot.

I keep the mixing board open in its own space. Consolidated Windows is in space 1; mixing board in space 2, MIDI Edit windows in space 3, instrument interfaces in space 4, and so forth. Sometimes there are over 25 windows open.

I'm using a 12 core Mac Pro, 40GB RAM, and a lot of very large hard drives. I don't know what the tipping point is in a setup like this. Maybe you've found it. But MOTU has run thousands of tracks with plugins, and it didn't stop working.

Just saying... there may be something wrong. I don't think DP really maxes out until your CPU maxes out.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I would begin to troubleshoot this problem, but I would start by examining the need for 600 tracks. Are those in use in every project? If not, there are better wAys to organize access to what is needed. If not, well that enters into a whole other esthetic that I best not comment on. Excess is a terrible thing my to waste.

[Lawson.]

Thanks for the responses, guys. I've just been using the track selector for now which is fine, but still doesn't slove my problem.

Something odd I've noticed is (about half the time) when I select a new track (folder), I get the beach ball of doom for ~10 seconds and then everything loads up. I'm running DP8 on the 13,2 iMac (3.4 GHz i7 + 32 GB RAM) and my CPU load seems fine. All of my MIDI tracks are hooked up to MAS VEP5 streaming from a slave PC (all SSD, 3.5 GHz 6-core Xeon, 64 GB RAM).

I don't always use all 600 tracks at any given time, but I use quite a lot of them and having an entire orchestra all ready to go is very useful.

[Shooshie]

You know, Lawson, I used to get the beachball a lot, but it just stopped happening at some point. It may have been the OS. I'm using OS 10.10.2 now, and everything's been working great. You might consider upgrading to Yosemite. Do your research and see if you'll be losing any important apps or plugins. I was able to upgrade just about everything.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

10.8 to 10.10 is a pretty big jump to be making mid-project. According to Apple 2nd tier tech (Applecare) there are some issues with 10.10.2 that forced me to drop back to 10.10.1. Some graphics "anomalies" like Spaces (actually full screen apps in my case) not always restoring the entire screen correctly and a major bug on some systems where powering down an external USB3 or TB peripheral reliably causes a kernel panic and system shutdown. I can reproduce that every time on my system with a TB SATA dock.

That said, All is pretty much running according to plan. THe ONLY app that sometimes crashes out of nowhere is... (drumroll) DP 8.07. Not often, but it still likes to just go south and since DP8.0x it doesn't bother to phone home to MOTU, so they are not seeing the crashes any longer to attempt to fix them unless (presumably) reported from users.

[Shooshie]

Wow. So far I haven't seen any of those issues, but I'm on a 2012 Mac Pro. It may be immune. And I'm not using USB3, though I've considered getting the PCI card for that. I'd love to get USB3 speeds on these little USB flash drives that are now getting up to 1TB in size. (still "keychain" sized, physically)

We'll see what happens if I do that. Maybe Apple will have their ducks in a row by then.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Yeah, flash drives that are USB3 compliant are amazing. I'm so ready to pitch those old ones, but they're still good for smaller file transfers. I do wish my Track 16 was USB3 as well, but the FW to TB conversion seems "pretty" reliable.

[Timeline]

Wow. So far I haven't seen any of those issues, but I'm on a 2012 Mac Pro. It may be immune. And I'm not using USB3, though I've considered getting the PCI card for that. I'd love to get USB3 speeds on these little USB flash drives that are now getting up to 1TB in size. (still "keychain" sized, physically)

We'll see what happens if I do that. Maybe Apple will have their ducks in a row by then.

Shooshie

I bought one and works ok. Don't use much usb power though or you will see issues. Mine is a 4 slot PCI card. German maker.