Bounce Suddenly Isn't Working Right

[jackibar]

I have DP 9 using the MOTU 828mkII audio interface and up until today everything was fine with this song I'm working on. However, now when I try to Bounce to Disk I'm getting a very distorted audio file and also the drum track (EZ Drummer) keeps going out at various points during the song. It plays fine in DP - but only messes up during the bounce! What on earth could be going on, and how do I fix it?

Thanks so much for any help. Right in the middle of a critical project!!

[mikehalloran]

What exactly are you doing? Is it crashing? What is your buffer setting? How much RAM do you have? What Mac? HHD or SSD?

[buzzsmith]

What Mike said.

And can you try a freeze instead of a bounce?


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[jackibar]

I have a 2009 MacPro with 14 GB of RAM. It is not crashing - just after the bounce when I play it back the drums start playing but then at some point during the song they aren't there any more. I have the buffer set to 512.

After I posted, I remembered I'd added a click track last night and that was the only thing I'd changed. This song had previously been bouncing fine. I turned the click OFF and tried again and the bounce worked fine then. This doesn't make sense to me though - what could cause the click to make it not bounce right? Or was that a coincidence?!

[mikehalloran]

I have a 2009 MacPro with 14 GB of RAM. It is not crashing - just after the bounce when I play it back the drums start playing but then at some point during the song they aren't there any more. I have the buffer set to 512.

After I posted, I remembered I'd added a click track last night and that was the only thing I'd changed. This song had previously been bouncing fine. I turned the click OFF and tried again and the bounce worked fine then. This doesn't make sense to me though - what could cause the click to make it not bounce right? Or was that a coincidence?!

The only thing I can think of is CPU overload and priorities. Try changing the buffer to 1024, add the click track and see if it misbehaves again—if not then that was likely the problem. If changing the buffer back to 512 causes it to act up again, you now know. If the buffer at 1024 doesn't have an effect, try the following:

If you are not in the habit of rebooting daily, try it. Many plugs and VIs have memory leaks. Running sudo purge in Terminal will free up some physical RAM but not as much as a reboot. If rebooting often makes the issue go away, add more RAM. My iMac runs much better now that I went from 20G to 32G RAM. Again this is something you can test by rebooting and not having a browser open—if it now behaves, you know—no difference then RAM is not the likely culprit.

The reason I asked if BTD was crashing your Mac is because that is a very reliable symptom of a bad stick of RAM.

DP uses virtual RAM also. A mechanical hard drive makes virtual RAM much less efficient. If you have less than 15% free space on your system drive, that can adversely affect virtual memory, too. Now that 1T SSDs are under $250 (2T under $600) + a $10 bracket, time to consider one for your system drive (it will change your life). BTD is much faster (much, much, much) and smoother when you boot and run DP from an SSD. If you're already running a large capacity SSD, ignore this paragraph, of course.

Sometimes weird things do happen once and don't repeat.

[kinnylandrum]

I have this exact same problem and have had it for months. It has been reported to MOTU.

Specifically what I have determined, in may case, is that somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute into any bounce, the audio from MIDI tracks cuts out and never comes back. This happens with numerous VIs (Kontakt, VSL, Real Guitar, B4 II using jBridgeM, others), in different user accounts, different buffers, different drives, different templates, etc. I have rescanned all plugins. The ONLY solution is to use 9.02, where it NEVER happens.

I use the click track all the time but I don't think that's the issue. I have a 2011 Mac Pro and use 10.9 and I suspect a bad interaction with 10.9 and Dp 9.12

Brian M at MOTU knows about this, and I have sent him two different project which he claims to not being able to duplicate the problem. If you left him a complaint at the MOTU web site, perhaps it would help him find the problem.

Thanks,
Kinny Landrum

[jackibar]

Forgot to say I do have an SSD drive for my system and apps and you're right - that sped everything up tremendously!!

Okay - tried setting buffer to 1024 and turned the click back on - same issue with no drums throughout whole song! Turned click back off and it's fine... I also tested ONLY bouncing the drums and that worked fine even with the click turned ON.

And when this first happened, the first thing I tried was a total reboot

So it's looking like for some reason bouncing does not like the click being turned on - which isn't a huge big deal since I recorded a click on an aux track.

Thanks guys for the help!

[kinnylandrum]

Maybe the click has something to do with it after all. I'll try a bounce with click off tomorrow and report back