Constant freeze-ups (for minutes) once you have a few takes

[mhschmieder]

This has been a problem for me for at least a few weeks, so may be Sierra related, but as these are my first full-band sessions in over a year, it is hard to say how many things that changed in that time could be contributing to this freeze-up problem.

I am very clear on the cause, as I can avoid it and sort-of fix it, and as it does NOT occur on my MIDI projects, regardless of the number of tracks. It is specifically related to how many takes are in the project, and likely multiplied by the number of tracks.

I use Groups during tracking, to speed up the flow and avoid down-time for clients. Perhaps this is a contributing factor as well. But what is annoying is that you can no longer shut off background processing entirely in DP9 as you could before; you can merely set a few preferences related to when it does it.

So my theory is that once you have a bunch of takes (say six or more) of drums (for me, this is 20 tracks for each take) and/or guitar and bass (four tracks each), DP is doing background processing for every possible combination of takes that might be used for take comping.

Once editing is done, takes are comped and consolidated, and the project cleaned of unused audio tracks and its undo buffer flushed, things usually return to normal, but not always. Sometimes it takes project-switching and multiple restarts and reboots before a project gets back to usable performance after it has even once been in a state of having lots of takes.

I think someone might have reported this earlier, but perhaps not in the troubleshooting section.

As one of the guitarists flaked today, we didn't have sessions as planned (grr... I don't have a lot of wiggle room in my schedule and make a lot of sacrifices to accommodate other people). I took James Steele's advice yesterday and checked the "never sleep" check box using "Get Info" and found that the Sierra upgrade had unchecked that box for me just as it did for him, so perhaps this will clear the problem up -- I won't know until my next sessions as I've already cleaned and comped all of the songs so far.

The worst part of this for me is that I lose my train of thought, as I'm always ten steps ahead in my mind and am multi-tasking. So the spinning beach ball of death can cause errors to be made.

[James Steele]

I think Sierra also set my hard drives to spin down after a while. I had to turn that off too.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

No such issues here. I wonder if it is machine model related? Apple probably tests in trash cans. I wonder how significant that might be and if the architecture of the machines is somehow relevant.

[Phil O]

Saw this problem on my old Mac Pro running DP 9.12 and OS 10.6.8. Problem solved by reverting to 9.02. I haven't seen the problem on my newer Mac Pro running DP 9.12 and OS 10.11.6. From what I've seen 9.12 is fussier about OS (or perhaps CPU/memory). My Mac is too old for Sierra, so I can't comment on that.

Phil

[mhschmieder]

That's all very useful feedback and gives me more stuff to look at, as well as whether to stay patient for the next MacPro's.

[Sean Kenny]

Hi not sure how useful this will be as I'm on Mavericks 10.9.5 running on a trashcan, but thought it worth mentioning as I record in the same way ie multiple instruments, multiple takes .. live and I have experienced the same problem from time to time. I found it less problematic when I went back to 9.02. I know it's stating the obvious to an old hand but check your audio drive isn't too fragmented try running the same project on a clean drive. Also for what it's worth, A few months back I just couldn't get a project to behave itself (in the same way you described) in the end I found the old trick of loading the problematic project into a new project fixed it. There is still something weird going on in version nine, where for no apparent reason the program will just randomly choose choose to reanalyse a load of audio. I know I should be on Sierra by now and will do that soon as I get the time. If I notice any improvement I'll post here. Cheers Sean

PS I wonder if recording live takes, back to back in a single take would make a difference. Sometimes I have recorded this way although it can be a pain. You could try this in a fresh copy of the offending project and re assemble all the band takes in a single DP 'Take' and see if that makes a difference. It may help prove, your suspicions of the DP takes being the problem.

[mhschmieder]

Sean, it's a fairly new drive, less than 40% full, so I doubt fragmentation is an issue. Also, I tried copying to new projects but got the same problem there, which is what (amongst other isolation-of-problem techniques) made it clear that the number of takes/tracks was the primary cause.

I haven't reverted to 9.02 yet as I'm going to try to get some work done on my own stuff tonight since the band I'm recording didn't stop by due to bad traffic making them too late to be worthwhile.

[mhschmieder]

Keeping my fingers crossed, after zero problems during yesterdays drum tracking sessions.

In half an hour, the drummer returns with a guitarist and possibly the bassist, so the track count will increase and likely also the number of takes before editing/comping.

I didn't revert to 9.02; I simply took care of the re-defaults from my Sierra upgrade that James and others mentioned.

[mhschmieder]

I am fairly confident now that AppNap was the culprit, as this problem has not returned since turning that "feature" back off again (like it was before my Sierra upgrade decided it knew better).