DP 9 skipping during playback

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 11:22 pm

Running DP 9 on A 2012 MacBook Pro 8gb ram, OSX Yosemite. Outputting to 828 mkiii via usb. My session is a sequence of chunks, running from 2-9 tracks of 16 bit 44k audio. Internal clocking, 512 buffer.

During playback, the audio performance meter runs really low, but at random points will spike once, hit the overload light red, audio skips, and then it continues on. This happens using two different sets of outboard gear. Just trying to troubleshoot and figure out what is going on.

Thanks in advance for any help.

James

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 12:09 am

That's a very light load. No way it should be pausing. This is happening within a chunk, right? Not between chunks.

Some things to consider:

OS X System Preferences: Energy Saver panel, set to keep disks running, not to sleep.
Read the DP9 "Getting Started" manual from page 25 to page 35, and see if anything there might help. Sometimes things like "Work Quanta" or "Max Work Percent" can affect performance.
Consider testing your RAM. You may also want more of it, but when I use a laptop with less RAM than yours, I have no problems with it.
Check your OS X Console logs to see what happened in the system at exactly that time, or directly before or after. If you see some process starting up or quitting or attempting to log in to something, and if it's happening each time DP is pausing, that may be your culprit. You may go to Activity Monitor and quit the process, or you may need to burrow into your system folder, find the offending 3rd party driver (or whatever it may be) and literally discard it.
I'm sure you've looked, but are there any background applications open?
Plugins: do you have lots of heavy plugins open? Try closing their windows, at least. If you have many plugins running, consider dropping the more demanding ones, such as look-ahead compressors, heavy reverbs, and such.
Plugins and Virtual Instruments can run in "Pre-Gen" mode, rather than Real Time. If you use PreGen, it can save a lot of CPU strain. Still, your load is so light that I doubt this is the problem unless you're using a heavy load of VIs that you're not mentioning.
Try a buffer of 1024 or higher. This should not be a problem, but it may help.
Have you noticed your Mac slowing down in other apps? Maybe a clean-install of the OS is in order.
Check for full disks. If your disks are nearly full, chances are your files could be extremely fragmented. Get some external drives.
Are you running lots of VIs off the System Disk? If you have VIs with their sample libraries located on the Mac's System Disk, you may run into problems like this. Get external drives (or internal, if it's a Mac Pro Tower) for your libraries. I run my system with DP files on one drive, VI libraries spread across many drives (generally one or two non-competing VIs per drive), and a system drive with Digital Performer.app on it, all separate. That's a minimum of 3 drives.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head right now. Maybe someone else will be able to help zero in on your problem.

Shooshie

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 8:19 am

Thanks for such a detailed answer. I'll explore all your suggestions and report back.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 9:00 am

If a Retina MBP, you cannot add RAM, if not, maxing at 16G is a very good idea. If you have a mechanical HD, time to consider an SSD.

Increasing the buffer on playback to 1024 should help. In any case, it's easy to test.

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:39 am

So I noticed that the log showed "syslogd: ASL sender statistics" popped up at the same moment a performance peak occurred."

That's it so far. I'm not running any plugins whatsoever.

Shooshie wrote:That's a very light load. No way it should be pausing. This is happening within a chunk, right? Not between chunks.

Some things to consider:

Check your OS X Console logs to see what happened in the system at exactly that time, or directly before or after. If you see some process starting up or quitting or attempting to log in to something, and if it's happening each time DP is pausing, that may be your culprit. You may go to Activity Monitor and quit the process, or you may need to burrow into your system folder, find the offending 3rd party driver (or whatever it may be) and literally discard it.

Shooshie

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 11:04 am

mikehalloran wrote:If a Retina MBP, you cannot add RAM, if not, maxing at 16G is a very good idea. If you have a mechanical HD, time to consider an SSD.

Increasing the buffer on playback to 1024 should help. In any case, it's easy to test.

Retina with SSD.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 11:56 am

I wouldn't know if that is a problem or not (syslog, etc.)
Here are some discussions on it:
https://www.google.com/search?client=sa ... 8&oe=UTF-8

It does appear to be associated with some odd things, like system drives crashing and causing interference with other apps. Maybe Mike H. will have some insight there.

Shooshie

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 5:24 pm

Shooshie wrote:I wouldn't know if that is a problem or not (syslog, etc.)
Here are some discussions on it:
https://www.google.com/search?client=sa ... 8&oe=UTF-8

It does appear to be associated with some odd things, like system drives crashing and causing interference with other apps. Maybe Mike H. will have some insight there.

Shooshie

Never heard of that being an issue but you can disable it to test.

Retina with SSD.

OK, that answers a few things.

You can free up physical RAM by doing a reboot or running sudo purge. Not a bad idea to get familiar with it.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=61938&p=527195&hili ... ge#p527195

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 6:51 pm

mikehalloran wrote:
Shooshie wrote:I wouldn't know if that is a problem or not (syslog, etc.)
Here are some discussions on it:
https://www.google.com/search?client=sa ... 8&oe=UTF-8

It does appear to be associated with some odd things, like system drives crashing and causing interference with other apps. Maybe Mike H. will have some insight there.

Shooshie
Never heard of that being an issue but you can disable it to test.

Me either. Just going by the stories from the googled pages in my link. But if a sudo purge will do it, so much the better.

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Thu Jun 23, 2016 9:35 am

Thank you so much for the help. One last thing, today there was a glitch where he following turned up in the log.
"
Windowserver: bug in libdispatch client: dispatch_mig_server_: mach_msg() failed (pic/send) msg too small - 0x0000008

Com.apple.xpc.launchd:
(Com.apple.quicklook[449] endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.quicklook"

Followed immediately by this about 150 times within a second

"Iconserviceagent: -[isgenerateimageop generateimagewithcompletion:]- failed to composit image for descriptor <isbindingimagedescriptor: 0x7f834ae14160>
Quicklookd: error returned from iconservicesagent: (null)"

The hex or whatever was not consistent and varies from error to error.

That definitely caused a glitch.

^ ok so after some digging, this appears that video files (quicktime) in my session were unable to make thumbnails and is a known osx bug. I'm assuming the OSX previews somehow messed up loading the videos into DP. It hasn't happened again, but it tweaks me out. I'm going to remove video files for now and find a different solution for that separately.

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:57 am

Also getting "Digital Performer: AVF error: Perf capability check failed: 0xe00002be"

and

"Digital Performer: [13:(varying ip)] CMBufferQueueEnqueue signalled err=12763 (kCMBufferQueueError_EnqueueAfterEndOfData) () at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia_frameworks/CoreMedia-1731.15.33/Sources/Core/FigBufferQueue/FigBufferQueue.c line 1372"

is popping up.

Can't find anything about it.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Thu Jun 23, 2016 3:04 pm

You might check the film-scoring forum for some clues. Everyone there uses video, so someone surely would know the best format to use. I'm not using video, currently, but I remember some discussion about there being a problem with some video formats in DP9. The fix is probably just a conversion to whatever everyone's using, but I don't want to get your hopes up. Let's see if someone comes along and fills in the blanks, here.

Shooshie

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Thu Jun 23, 2016 5:46 pm

I'm out of town but there's also a preference in audio where peaking, even for a microsecond, will stop playback. Disabling it lets the peak go by w/o stopping playback. You might want to check it out.

Jamesisntcool · Post by **Jamesisntcool** » Sun Jan 01, 2017 1:03 am

So this keeps happening intermittently and with no real pattern. I'm at an absolute loss. Ran a rehearsal today of 1 hour long set, just a simple stereo file. In rehearsal it ran fine, come showtime, it skipped a few times. I'm thinking I might have to get away from DP and find a different solution.

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