Sudden Volume Changes

supersonic · Post by **supersonic** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 1:14 am

Hello,

I get sudden random volume changes using Stylus RMX in DP. The sequence has no volume automation.

Has any one of the unicornation wizards an idea where that can come from

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 2:12 am

This is not a Stylus issue, and no one is quite sure what causes it. I've seen it happen with a diversity of VIs, both AU and MAS. A buddy of mine runs DP in a professional studio doing audio only, and he's never had the problem. It's definitely a general VI issue.

fwiw-- you're not alone!

Check here:
http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23099

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15482

Timeline · Post by **Timeline** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 5:51 am

I have had little MIDI & audio lev pops in DP as well that happen intermittently depending on buffer settings and complexity of arrangement.

HeadMaster · Post by **HeadMaster** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 5:57 am

Frodo wrote:This is not a Stylus issue, and no one is quite sure what causes it. I've seen it happen with a diversity of VIs, both AU and MAS. A buddy of mine runs DP in a professional studio doing audio only, and he's never had the problem. It's definitely a general VI issue.

fwiw-- you're not alone!

Check here:
http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23099

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15482

It has to do with MIDI and copy/paste, I have no evidence for it, but I am 99% sure now. In projects where I edited and copied MIDI back and forth, I have had this problem many times. But in project that has been straightforward one cut MIDI-recording and so forth, it has never happened, ever.

Hard to tell what's causing it, but there is something fishy with the copy/paste stuff, dunno yet if it's a "Problem between keyboard and chair", or if it is an actual bug.

. . .
HM

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 9:26 am

I had major issues earlier in the year with this.

Having not fired DP up for some months, I did so this week.
I've been experimenting with template creation (still!), but only now decided I had to create something to truly test the latest "new file".
You wouldn't read about it, but the problem of the flammy volume burst hasn't manifested. Not once.
It used to occur every few minutes or so, in every file I played.
For some reason, my Mac sped up in general a week or two ago after having dragged its feet for months.
Sounds like OSX could be to blame...

Dunno; I'm just wrapped DP's kickin' butt.

Timeline · Post by **Timeline** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 10:01 am

Ah, You to MM?

I hear it easily on drum notes where high hat's involved. It's like some volume data disregards the MIDI info and plays 100% for one note. Weird.

Could be when buffers run out that's the first to go because it's intermittent and increase in buffers cleans it up.

I have had to increase buffers as much as 3 x 1024 to run without this artifact recently.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 12:03 pm

HeadMaster wrote:It has to do with MIDI and copy/paste, I have no evidence for it, but I am 99% sure now. In projects where I edited and copied MIDI back and forth, I have had this problem many times. But in project that has been straightforward one cut MIDI-recording and so forth, it has never happened, ever.

Hard to tell what's causing it, but there is something fishy with the copy/paste stuff, dunno yet if it's a "Problem between keyboard and chair", or if it is an actual bug.

. . .
HM

C/P can indeed set it off and for a long time that was my only clue as to what may be at the root of the problem. But because I do a lot of orchestral writing that is often entirely linear with no C/P involved and have experienced the volume surges I've tried to refine my theory.

Keep in mind, this is *only* one theory!

Where C/P calls for the same samples, so does playing the exact same notes within a certain velocity range where velocity layers are involved in sample patch construction. I don't know the formula for how many times the same notes may be copied or how many times the same notes may be played repeatedly or how far apart these may be spaced before the surges start to happen, but I now believe that once a project calls for more than 32 threads as displayed in the Activity Monitor under "total processes" some sort of memory leak kicks in as Tiger's quasi or semi 64-bit processes struggle to reconcile themselves within the context of a 32-bit application.

stats, fwiw:

If it happened on my G4 tower, I don't recall it being a real problem. I clearly remember it starting on my G5 2.5 dual under DP 4.6x. I can't pin it down to the MIDI driver version, and it also carried over to my MacPro.

This is something I hope will go away with Leopard. It seemed to go away when 5.11 was released under 10.4.6 and 10.4.7 (circa Nov-Dec, 2006), but we've since seen 10.4.8, 10.4.9, and 10.4.10-- and DP 5.12-- and we've seen the problem again.

There has also always been some quirk going on with the way UNIX stubbornly hangs onto old file references. I suspect that this is associated with why permissions have to be repaired so often and why preferences go corrupt as often as they do and must be trashed.

Repairing permissions with DP open can free up some memory, but quitting DP and repairing permissions cleans up virtual memory nicely. Restarting the computer does an even better job of it-- and sometimes restarting has to be done more than once. Running the same projects after repairing permissions or restart will eventually trigger the surges again.

I also agree with you that the complexity of the project is at play, although I've not been able to isolate the surges to specific locations along the project time line. Sometimes, it seems to happen in the same places, but it remains unpredictable. Once again, complexity points to the numbers of threads in action in the Activity Monitor.

That's as far as I got before I got tired of guessing and troubleshooting.

Anyway, even if this info doesn't reveal a solution, I at least hope it spares someone else the time and agony of a lot of useless experimentation.

greg328 · Post by **greg328** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 7:27 pm

It's happening to me too. OS 10.4.10, DP 5.12, 1st Gen dual 2 Ghz G5..

Major pain-in-the-butt during mix-down...

Greg

supersonic · Post by **supersonic** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 12:54 am

I wonder whether there is a way to track down everything that's happening in an os x application and have a log of this. This way, when the burst occurs, one can send the log to MOTU.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 1:20 am

supersonic wrote:I wonder whether there is a way to track down everything that's happening in an os x application and have a log of this. This way, when the burst occurs, one can send the log to MOTU.

Wish there were an answer. Thing is, DP and OSX are doing what each thinks is right. It's not clear how a volume surge would register if the actual controller data doesn't reflect the change. Even there, the only was to really determine that a volume change is desired or not desired is to have a corresponding audio take to send to motu with the data log. The log would have to show events along a timeline, I would think, and where the surges occur in the track, events could be studied in the log at the same location.

Then again, someone here on U-nation probably already has a link to some shareware site with the magic bullet.

HeadMaster · Post by **HeadMaster** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 4:48 am

Frodo wrote:
HeadMaster wrote:It has to do with MIDI and copy/paste, I have no evidence for it, but I am 99% sure now. In projects where I edited and copied MIDI back and forth, I have had this problem many times. But in project that has been straightforward one cut MIDI-recording and so forth, it has never happened, ever.

Hard to tell what's causing it, but there is something fishy with the copy/paste stuff, dunno yet if it's a "Problem between keyboard and chair", or if it is an actual bug.

. . .
HM
C/P can indeed set it off and for a long time that was my only clue as to what may be at the root of the problem. But because I do a lot of orchestral writing that is often entirely linear with no C/P involved and have experienced the volume surges I've tried to refine my theory.

Keep in mind, this is *only* one theory!

Where C/P calls for the same samples, so does playing the exact same notes within a certain velocity range where velocity layers are involved in sample patch construction. I don't know the formula for how many times the same notes may be copied or how many times the same notes may be played repeatedly or how far apart these may be spaced before the surges start to happen, but I now believe that once a project calls for more than 32 threads as displayed in the Activity Monitor under "total processes" some sort of memory leak kicks in as Tiger's quasi or semi 64-bit processes struggle to reconcile themselves within the context of a 32-bit application.

stats, fwiw:

If it happened on my G4 tower, I don't recall it being a real problem. I clearly remember it starting on my G5 2.5 dual under DP 4.6x. I can't pin it down to the MIDI driver version, and it also carried over to my MacPro.

This is something I hope will go away with Leopard. It seemed to go away when 5.11 was released under 10.4.6 and 10.4.7 (circa Nov-Dec, 2006), but we've since seen 10.4.8, 10.4.9, and 10.4.10-- and DP 5.12-- and we've seen the problem again.

There has also always been some quirk going on with the way UNIX stubbornly hangs onto old file references. I suspect that this is associated with why permissions have to be repaired so often and why preferences go corrupt as often as they do and must be trashed.

Repairing permissions with DP open can free up some memory, but quitting DP and repairing permissions cleans up virtual memory nicely. Restarting the computer does an even better job of it-- and sometimes restarting has to be done more than once. Running the same projects after repairing permissions or restart will eventually trigger the surges again.

I also agree with you that the complexity of the project is at play, although I've not been able to isolate the surges to specific locations along the project time line. Sometimes, it seems to happen in the same places, but it remains unpredictable. Once again, complexity points to the numbers of threads in action in the Activity Monitor.

That's as far as I got before I got tired of guessing and troubleshooting.

Anyway, even if this info doesn't reveal a solution, I at least hope it spares someone else the time and agony of a lot of useless experimentation.

Wooooh! This do make some sense, I hope MOTU reads your theory an digs in to it, would be fairly easy to narrow down and measure/track in their development environment.

Good work dude!

. . .
HM

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 9:47 am

Guinea pig #31122 here.
Who knows whether this will help or not, but here goes...
I've retraced my steps of the last 9 months or so; I can't tell you how tired I am of folks asking why I'm walking backwards, but something changed and I seriously haven't had this glitch today either.
The only changes I've made to the setup have been:

1) Removed all PPC plugs in preparation for Intel. I figured it'd be better to bite the bullet sooner rather than have the arrival of a shiny new Mac tarnished by plug disappointments one day.

2) Removed all VST plugs, both PPC and UB, for the same reason and because VST Wrapper seems to be dying a slow death.

3) Removed PoCo, both because it was intermittently flakey, and because the plugs were mostly VST and PPC.

4) Updated from the PCI v.1.1.2 to the latest v.1.2.0 driver.

5) Removed all PPC screensavers for the same reason again. Yup, I've been a sucker for savers, but they've been set up so that only manual control from System Prefs is possible.

I'm tellin' y'all, Unicorns, nothing else has changed.
I'm actually quite excited about this... touch wood.
Hopefully someone reads this and a light goes off...

supersonic · Post by **supersonic** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 11:55 am

monkey man wrote:Guinea pig #31122 here.

1) Removed all PPC plugs in preparation for Intel. I figured it'd be better to bite the bullet sooner rather than have the arrival of a shiny new Mac tarnished by plug disappointments one day.

2) Removed all VST plugs, both PPC and UB, for the same reason and because VST Wrapper seems to be dying a slow death.

3) Removed PoCo, both because it was intermittently flakey, and because the plugs were mostly VST and PPC.

4) Updated from the PCI v.1.1.2 to the latest v.1.2.0 driver.

5) Removed all PPC screensavers for the same reason again. Yup, I've been a sucker for savers, but they've been set up so that only manual control from System Prefs is possible.

I don't have any PPC plug-ins, no poco, no VST and no screensavers. But I do run on an intel MacBook Pro. And it still does that. I'll be doing some test with different plug-in configurations (using plug-in administrator). Speaking of MIDI I've managed to synchronise a PC application running in a VMware to Digital Performer. And that has made my day

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 6:43 am

I realised today that I'd also...

6) Installed iTunes 7.4.2 and QT 7.0.3.

Probably means nothing...

supersonic · Post by **supersonic** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 7:02 am

I've got lots of MIDI coming up this year so I'll have plenty of time to try and see if we can get to the bottom of this.