DP 9.02 crashes on Save: RESOLVED--preferences

[TinenTech]

Last night during a crucial session I experienced a problem I've never had before. I had been recording vocal overdubs and punching in repeatedly on a not-too-complex track, hadn't saved for about 6 minutes, when I got the dreaded "Digital Performer has crashed unexpectedly" message. OS X 10.11.3 had not crashed. I reopened DP (9.02--haven't upgraded because this has been stable for me and I've had no issues for weeks of work) and the session opened OK...until I tried to Save As.... Then DP crashed again.

Of course I shut down completely and rebooted...
Opened a version of the same session that had been backed up onto a different drive...
Tried different Autosave versions of the session, all crashed on Save...
...(but noticed that the most recent Autosave happened at the moment of the initial crash)
Noticed that Save As creates an empty 0 MB session file in the folder under a new name
(which gives you the "Unexpected end of file" error when you click on it)
Opened an entirely different session...
Disconnected entirely from my interfaces and drives and opened a session on the internal drive...
Result: no change. Sessions open, but when I Save or Save As, I got a hard crash of DP.

It seems that in the middle of a session, the Digital Performer application got corrupted somehow on the internal hard drive. Note: I was recording onto an external drive (USB 3.0).

I assume my next step is to reinstall DP, probably using the upgrade package to go to 9.12. But I thought I'd report my experience since I've never had an application be corrupted somehow in the middle of use. This may be some obscure OS X bug...

[mikehalloran]

You can download and reinstall 9.02. If you installed or upgraded something recently, this will restore certain paths in DP.

With the changes between 9.02 and 9.12, I wouldn't change versions in the middle of a session.

The other thing to do is a Safe Boot holding the Shift key. When done, reboot normally. This resets many paths and your default caches.

You've not given any information that gives me a clue as to the problem so I'm not going to try. Both of the above are harmless in that there is no way for your data to become corrupted and there's a possibility that either or both will help.

If I were to guess, your USB 3 drive fell asleep and didn't wake up. Make certain that, after rebooting, your Mac can still see it.

[TinenTech]

Thanks for your prompt suggestions, Mike.
This is beginning to be very serious...I've reinstalled DP 9.02 (uninstalled by simply dragging the app to the Trash, but I confess I didn't bother to delete all the Application Support files and preferences first) [this turned out to be a crucial error...] and it still crashes when I try to save a file.

To be clear, any session opens up and plays fine. When I Save As..., or just Save, it opens up a normal Finder dialog, and the second I press the Save button, DP crashes!

I did boot up in Safe Mode before all this (wow, haven't done that in years) to reset paths as you suggested. No change.

The USB 3 drive (a Seagate SATA in a Voyager dock) didn't show any signs of going to sleep or being offline. The only other anomaly yesterday was three hours before the crash in FireWire, when the FW800 cable going to my 896 interface had to be replugged to get the Mac to see it. (I have a Traveler upstream of the 896 as well.) When MOTU Audio Setup found my "MOTU Aggregate Device", it had a message at the bottom I'd never seen, saying "Bandwidth limited, lower sampling rate [it was already 44.1] or disable some paths." I disabled the ADAT optical ins and outs because I'm not using them this session. But, again, today I am using this MacBook without any interfaces or external drives and the bug is still there, on all sessions I've tried.

As far as the MacBook Pro is concerned, it's behaving normally with all other applications as far as I can tell. I ran a Disk Utility/First Aid on my internal boot drive, no problems found.

[mikehalloran]

I agree there's something wrong but a bug? No way to tell.

The FW problem may be an indicator. Try resetting your NV RAM. Among other things, it resets your FW and USB buses to spec. When FW hiccups, this has always worked for me.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

[cuttime]

I hope you didn't hot swap the FW cable. I strongly advise against doing that again.

[TinenTech]

After a whole bunch of things that should have worked (reinstalling DP, Mike's suggestions) the only thing that worked was booting from an old cloned drive that had Mac OS X 10.8 on it, which got me through a rough mix session.

I finally put up a Tech Link request to MOTU which Brian M. answered as follows:

If the issue occurs in multiple projects, it could indicate a corrupted preference file within DP. This would necessitate a preference removal. You can confirm this by launching DP in another user account on your Mac. Since the preference files in question are user-specific, DP would launch/run without issue in another user account if these files are corrupted on your main account.

If you’ve confirmed that the issue is isolated to the original user account, [yes, that turned out to be true]use the following steps to proceed with the preference removal. Note that this process will reset any custom configurations you may have set, such as Themes/Colors, Project Templates, and Command Bindings. It will also cause DP to rescan your audio plug-ins upon startup.

First, quit DP. Then, open any Finder window and click the Go menu. With the menu exposed, hold the Option key and click the Library item that appears in the list. Scroll down to the folder called Preferences, and locate the folder and .plist files named “com.motu.DigitalPerformer,” as well as “com.motu.MotuAudioSystem.”

Move these to the desktop, open DP and test the behavior. If the behavior is corrected, you can try replacing specific preference files from within the com.motu.DigitalPerformer folder, but I recommend resetting them manually.

Please try these suggestions and let me know your results.

Thanks and good luck,
Brian

We're so lucky that MOTU hasn't been taken over by some conglomerate that wants to cut corners on product support
I must say it's a puzzle that preferences turned out to be the problem; I haven't had a prefs issue since DP5, I think. And I wasn't doing anything at the time of the crash that should have had anything to do with prefs, knowingly. Perhaps in the heat of overdubbing and inserting I hit some key combination that affected Command Bindings in an illegal way, and when it Autosaved it also saved an illegal preference.

[terrybritton]

Brian definitely rocks, as do all the others at MOTU's tech support.

For those with Windows systems who happened upon this thread, the preference files are in:

C:\Users\yourLogin\AppData\Local\MOTU\Digital Performer\Preferences

and

C:\Users\yourLogin\AppData\Local\MOTU\MOTU Audio System

Terry