DP works fine, but veery slow opening projects??

[donreynolds]

As I open projects now, It seems that DP is taking a significantly longer time to open. I repair permission, restart computer, Delete unused soundbites, etc. but no difference.

Granted smaller projects open faster, but prior to the last several months, even my bigger projects loaded faster.

Even when I reset my buffer after recording, it seems to take longer to get the project moving again.

Any suggestions? I have not loaded any new plugins since the Ilok scare.
Other than that, the program runs great, CPU looks fine, all cores seem pretty low.

Thanks,
Don

[mikehalloran]

Other than raw horsepower, I have no clue. Your system specs give generalities but I can't tell what you have. That there was a sudden change is a mystery.

I was going to swap my 2010 i7 iMac for my wife's 2011 i5 since hers has Thunderbolt. Then I ran a project on a friend's iMac identical to my wife's. It was a simple but long 2 track project with no 3rd party plugins in DP 7.24. We tracked at his studio and finished in mine.

The thing I noticed was that, compared to my i7, DP took much longer to open. The project was 25 minutes long but it took under a minute to open on my machine and many minutes to open and for the wave forms to draw properly on the i5. We're talking a lot longer. Once open, I noticed no difference between the two machines - of course, the little bit processing was all done with my system.

Besides the i5 vs i7, both 2011s have video cards with 512MB RAM while mine has 1G. My machine had 12G RAM while the i5s had 4G (all since upgraded).

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Just a shot in the dark but I'd suspect that a hard disk may be to blame, not DP per se.

[Armageddon]

I agree ... first, try running something like iDefrag or Tech Tools Pro from a boot disk and get your hard drive in order. Second, go into your DP project's folder, grab the "Analysis Files" folder and trash it. DP will generate a new one the next time you open your project. Third, after opening your project, try deleting your Undo history (assuming you have nothing you want to undo), saving your project and reopening it.

Another thing, and this is something I will have to sit down and figure out how to prevent happening on my own DP projects: every time you do a waveform edit in your Sequence or Graphic Editor window, it creates a new sub-soundfile. Not sure why that is; most DAWs consider edits just markers for dropping out parts of the waveform until you compact the "unused" portions of the actual audio file in your DAW's waveform editor and make it a destructive edit. Until I can figure out a way to circumvent this, what I've been doing is, I go into my Soundbites window after I'm done editing, pull down its menu and select "Select Unused Soundbites", which then allows me to delete all these unnecessary files from the project.

[donreynolds]

I'l try those suggestions. Thanks guys. Let you know what happens

[Radiogal]

Yep, probably a hard drive on its way down..

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Yep, probably a hard drive on its way down..

It happens...

[Tobor]

All of the above plus..... Mountain Lion??

[donreynolds]

I am super hesitant about upgrading.... just saying'

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Then don't upgrade but at some point you either have to get with it or suffer the consequences with only one solution available, hesitant or not. The only reason not to upgrade is plug or other software incompatibility.

[leigh]

I just upgraded to this iMac:



with the 3 TB fusion drive and I'm loving it. It boots in seconds.

I don't do a lot of projects with high track counts and lot's of plugs and VIs but I have no problems running Sibelius orchestra scores with Vienna Ensemble 64-bit server with 3 or 4 Vienna Ensemble instances and DP 8 at 96 KHz is very peppy. I can have lots of instances of Altiverb running, too.

I have my VSL, Mach Five and Ethno libraries on an OWC Mercury Elite drive connected via USB3. I tried connecting it using the LaCie TB-eSATA box but it was unreliable. I have my ULN-8 interface on one TB-FW cable and my Time Machine disk on the other TB-FW cable.

So glad I got rid of the old Mac Pro with the 30" Cinema Display. The iMac screen is really great, too, very bright and sharp. And the iMac is almost completely silent; I have to put my ear next to it to hear it at all.

**Leigh

[mhschmieder]

I suspect Preferences are at fault. After doing some system upgrades, I got brave and enabled background analysis, rendering, beat detection, etc. I haven't tried switching them off again to see if projects load faster. But some projects keep churning away and require a resave (usually automatic in DP8) before you can quit, even if you were "done" ten minutes ago.

There are some new preferences in DP8. Some of them may default to "expensive" background operations. I do notice that disabling all or most of my plug-ins (something I usually do anyway if I'm not mixing) seems to make no difference on project load time.