Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

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Gravity Jim
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Gravity Jim »

Well, it wasn't designed to run on your specific machine. It was designed to run on a clean Mac with third-party I/O bullsh•• cluttering up the command queue.

All I can ever say to any of these threads is A) it runs great everyday at my place, and B) that means it's not a problem with DP.
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Robert Randolph
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Robert Randolph »

Gravity Jim wrote:Well, it wasn't designed to run on your specific machine. It was designed to run on a clean Mac with third-party I/O bullsh•• cluttering up the command queue.

All I can ever say to any of these threads is A) it runs great everyday at my place, and B) that means it's not a problem with DP.
It could also mean C) You don't use all the same features of DP that other people do, so you may not encounter the same issues.

I've spoken directly to a number of people at Motu and have been able to get a number of 9.12 specific issues confirmed. All of these were tested in a fresh install of OS X/macOS. All of them also were reproducible on the systems at Motu.

If 9.12 were perfectly fine as you seem to indicate, then we can all expect the next update with no stability improvements or bug fixes. Let's see if that happens :smash:
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cuttime
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by cuttime »

Wow. Perfect software. Who'd of thought it possible.
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terrybritton
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by terrybritton »

I've been trying to tell everybody about this. It has gone far enough. MOTU - You Have To Face! :deadhorse:

(Does this thread belong in the new "Therapy Corner"?)

Seriously, though:
Eventually, I am confident that MOTU will get the coolness that was supposed to be 9.12 worked out for you all. (As I recall, this was quite a bug fix, too, skipping over the poor choice of calling it version 9.11.)

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MIDI Life Crisis
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

terrybritton wrote:I've been trying to tell everybody about this. It has gone far enough. MOTU - You Have To Face! :deadhorse:
OK, so we're off topic a little now, but you want to now what is truly spectacular? Well, besides THAT!

The guy who made what may be the most iconic and quoted post in the history of this forum posted only that one time and never since. That's too bad and I hope he gets our humor, and also our repeated reference to his post. It really does say it all when one is having a problem and one's work depends on the functioning of a particular program.

Indeed, we must ALL face our own "bugs" one way or another...

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Michael Canavan
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Michael Canavan »

Robert Randolph wrote: The issue is that for most of us that have issues with 9.12, 9.02 works perfectly fine. Most of these issues are unique to DP as well.

That transcends the idea of it being a hardware or configuration issue. It's a regression in stability and functionality.
That's not true at all. There are plenty of examples of bad code from a third party plug in or driver that only affects a certain DAW. Battery 2 was specifically causing crashes in Ableton Live, it worked perfectly fine in DP and Logic for me. Ableton acknowledged the bug and said that the onus was on Native Instruments, and the next update to Battery 2 fixed the crashes. All DAWs are not the same, and a DAW can specifically write their hosting code rigidly to AU and VST spec, and have more issues, not less. The best example of this is when MOTU stringently followed AU spec when AU came out. Unbeknownst to them Apple had tweaked the spec to fix -Logic plug in hosting specific- issues. DP had massive amounts of crashes and at first everyone blamed MOTU until Apple came clean.

Culpability when things go wrong cannot truly be figured out by the end user. All you can do is run tests to determine which driver of plug in on your system is specifically in conflict with the DAW, but culpability is another thing entirely. Remember MOTU stated some manufacturers had issues with running things in NextGen PreGen in terms of it not working 100%, I sincerely doubt that MOTU took up this task with no regard to AU and VST spec, it's very very likely that plug in manufacturers are hooking into code that isn't specifically to those specs, and that's the biggest reason for issues people are having with 9.12. It's also of course possible that the NextGen PreGen code needs to be tweaked by MOTU to fixed these issues. Placing blame on MOTU is jumping to conclusions.

Just saying, problem exists, we do not know who is at fault for the crippling problems you guys had with 9.12, but it's obvious it is not affecting everyone. It's easy to blame MOTU, but it's very possibly not their fault.
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Robert Randolph
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Robert Randolph »

Michael Canavan wrote: Just saying, problem exists, we do not know who is at fault for the crippling problems you guys had with 9.12, but it's obvious it is not affecting everyone. It's easy to blame MOTU, but it's very possibly not their fault.
There are definitely issues in 9.12 that are demonstrable on a clean system with only DP installed. Whether all users will encounter them is another story.

This really just seems to be an issue of DP (and any complex software) having such a huge feature-set that many people will dodge problems, and some people will run in to them headfirst constantly.

I do have a list of problems here on the forum, many of which have been confirmed by Motu and are not third-party dependent (I test all issues on a clean install of 10.11 and 10.12 now and specifically exclude issues that are reliant on third-party products).

Anyway, this discussion keeps coming up, and Motu keeps releasing bug fix updates for issues that some people seem to want to claim are non-existent. I find it very strange.
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Michael Canavan
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Michael Canavan »

Robert Randolph wrote:
Michael Canavan wrote: Just saying, problem exists, we do not know who is at fault for the crippling problems you guys had with 9.12, but it's obvious it is not affecting everyone. It's easy to blame MOTU, but it's very possibly not their fault.
There are definitely issues in 9.12 that are demonstrable on a clean system with only DP installed. Whether all users will encounter them is another story.

This really just seems to be an issue of DP (and any complex software) having such a huge feature-set that many people will dodge problems, and some people will run in to them headfirst constantly.

I do have a list of problems here on the forum, many of which have been confirmed by Motu and are not third-party dependent (I test all issues on a clean install of 10.11 and 10.12 now and specifically exclude issues that are reliant on third-party products).

Anyway, this discussion keeps coming up, and Motu keeps releasing bug fix updates for issues that some people seem to want to claim are non-existent. I find it very strange.
No one has said that bugs are non-existant. You're conflating bugs with DP in general with specific completely crippling bugs that have people running back to 9.02. If my system is not crippled by errant cpu spikes and audio glitching then that specific bug, apparently related to NextGen PreGen implementation isn't demonstrable on all machines. Not at all the same as the Automation Snapshot, or VSTi MIDI input bugs that show up universally, and don't necessarily prevent you from working in 9.12. On my machine the CPU meter jumps around all over the place at 128 buffer when I've got full racks of VST/AU's, but it doesn't glitch the audio stream. I'm using heavy pig VSTi's like Maschine, Diva, Bazzile, Kontakt with Cinesamples libraries, EastWest Orchestral libraries in Play, Altiverb etc. etc.

This is a conversation I've been on all sides of over the years, with various DAWs as the culprit. My point is and will be that the specific bug that has most people running back to previous versions, (spiking CPU, glitching of audio), is not reproducible on all machines, leading me to believe it's due to software conflicts. Whether that's MOTU's fault or not is not knowable. I seriously don't get why that's somehow a controversial stance? We're musicians, not developers with degrees in DSP coding.
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Robert Randolph
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Robert Randolph »

Michael Canavan wrote: No one has said that bugs are non-existant. You're conflating bugs with DP in general with specific completely crippling bugs that have people running back to 9.02. If my system is not crippled by errant cpu spikes and audio glitching then that specific bug, apparently related to NextGen PreGen implementation isn't demonstrable on all machines. Not at all the same as the Automation Snapshot, or VSTi MIDI input bugs that show up universally, and don't necessarily prevent you from working in 9.12.
Motu has been able to reliably reproduce the performance issues in at least 2 ways I know of, however they require that you use certain features in DP. [edit: removed specifics]

A lot of users may never use those features, however they are integral parts of DP that do not rely on third-party software.

This is not much different than if the drum editor caused random crashes. Probably 95% of DP's user base would never notice or care and think DP is super great, but everyone that uses the drum editor would have a terrible experience. In fact this is just like the nudge tool in DP, which is currently broken. Of the few people that use it, I'm not sure many would notice, but when it matters it's exceptionally annoying. Same with the buggy tab key behaviour which can cause you to make some nasty changes to your project accidentally, but not many people actually use the tab key as intended to begin with! Window sets are partially broken in 9.12 and are an integral feature to a small subset of users, but I suspect a large part of the userbase never touches them or doesn't modify them frequently.

Some people may notice these bugs and brush them off, but for some workflows they can be crippling. It really depends on how you use DP.

I'm only entering this discussion based purely off things that I've confirmed with Motu's support team. If I can't get them to reproduce it, then it's my problem. There's a number of things in 9.12 that aren't my problem though.

It's not the end of the world. 9.02 works fine, but depending on one's needs and expectations of the software 9.12 may not be the best version to proceed to. It's always worth a try at least though.
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by HCMarkus »

Michael Canavan wrote:On my machine the CPU meter jumps around all over the place at 128 buffer when I've got full racks of VST/AU's, but it doesn't glitch the audio stream. I'm using heavy pig VSTi's like Maschine, Diva, Bazzile, Kontakt with Cinesamples libraries, EastWest Orchestral libraries in Play, Altiverb etc. etc.
Latency at Buffer 256 on DP9.12 = Latency at Buffer 128 on 9.0.

I find 9.12 is very useable at 256, even 512, when tracking VIs, particularly if I have the "Sync MIDI to Real Time" (I may have that name wrong) option enabled in the MIDI preference pane.

9.12 runs waaaay better for me at 256 or 512 than at 128. You might want to give it a whirl Michael.
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by terrybritton »

HCMarkus wrote:
Michael Canavan wrote:On my machine the CPU meter jumps around all over the place at 128 buffer when I've got full racks of VST/AU's, but it doesn't glitch the audio stream. I'm using heavy pig VSTi's like Maschine, Diva, Bazzile, Kontakt with Cinesamples libraries, EastWest Orchestral libraries in Play, Altiverb etc. etc.
Latency at Buffer 256 on DP9.12 = Latency at Buffer 128 on 9.0.

I find 9.12 is very useable at 256, even 512, when tracking VIs, particularly if I have the "Sync MIDI to Real Time" (I may have that name wrong) option enabled in the MIDI preference pane.

9.12 runs waaaay better for me at 256 or 512 than at 128. You might want to give it a whirl Michael.
Just mentioning as another data point for this - I never run 9.12 at lower buffer settings than 256, and usually run it at 512 for my CPU hog VSTi's.

I also admit to never using any of the features mentioned by Robert as problematic, so that would explain perhaps why I'm not having issues with this version.

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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Michael Canavan »

I run at 128 because I've used Guitar Rig for guitar for years. Once I'm in the mix down phase I'll drop to 2048 even, to be able to run mastering limiters, EQ, compressor pigs etc. on the master out. Mostly DP 9.12 handles record armed or active V-Racked instruments like Maschine much differently than before, so the more armed tracks you have the more the CPU jumps around.

To clarify again, I'm not stating that DP9.12 doesn't have bugs, just addressing the main one people have talked about, where NextGen does not work like it's supposed to. It does on my system for the most part, and my guess is it's due to my specific combination of plug ins VS those with issues.
No doubt it seems there's a trade off where disk processing goes up, gets jumpy when it does work, I have my tracks on an SSD running at at least 350mbs, so that probably prevents some disk handling errors others are seeing for instance. I really hope an update is due so everyone can go back to worrying about specific bugs rather than a generalized lack of power / audio glitching compared to earlier versions etc.
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Gravity Jim
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Gravity Jim »

I have never understood the speed-shop competition to see who can run the lowest possible buffer settings. Seriously... can you hear it? Is the latency low enough for you to play in time? Everything in synch? Then who cares how low your buffer is? They're not going to print your incredible low buffer number on the record or credit it in the show, and if I were to say to a game client, "You know, all my music is produced with a sample buffer of only 128, they'd say, "Uuhhhh.... okay. Good for you."

A low buffer number doesn't affect the sound quality or your creativity. I've never run DP under any OSX version at buffers lowers than 256, because I don't have to. The latency of my system is plenty ow enough at that setting. And as Michael says above, at mixdown I'll run it high.

This may be one reason why I'm always showing up here saying, "Bug? What bug?" Reading this forum for many years has brought me to the conclusion that 98% of all reported problems are the result of screwing around with your computer just for the sake of doing it.
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Michael Canavan
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Michael Canavan »

Jim , as a guitar player, yes I can tell when the buffer is at 256 vs 128. I don't use an amplifier anymore, directly to the sound card. Been doing it this way for 15 years or more, and yes I vastly prefer 128 or even 64 sample buffers over 256. 512 is barely playable and I'm not a fast guitar player, I couldn't imagine what sort of problems 256 would give to a good drummer playing AU/VSTi's in terms of drum rolls etc.
No part of the manual says 256 is as low as you can go and you're tweaking DP if you go lower. In fact MOTU recommend lower latency settings with DP9.12.

Plus, and this is big, do you really think that's not the first thing people do when encountering CPU and or disc performance problems?? of freaking course people raise the buffer. Give people a little more credit, really.
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Gravity Jim
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Re: Is DP 9.12 unusually unstable?

Post by Gravity Jim »

Credit for what?

I see continual conversations here and elsewhere about getting your DAW's buffers down to ridiculously low numbers, and then plenty of speed-shop bragging about how low someone got theirs by endless screwing around.

I, too, am a guitar player, with a sense of time that's, in a word, perfect (ask my jazz piano teacher about it), and I have no trouble playing in time at 256, although I prefer 128 for tracking.

It just strikes me as a gas-milage-style argument, with buffer numbers as standing in for 10ths of a mile per gallon.

And I thought the first thing everybody did when having problem was dumb busy work like repairing disk permissions. Thankfully we can't do that anymore and it will fade from the board.

Finally, why do you take this a personal insult? I don't give two flips how anybody else runs DP. I'm just telling you my experience. Jesus, you kids are touchy anymore.
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