Strange problem of Stop/Start/Stop/Start transport in DP

[Shooshie]

I've been off of DP for about a month, and was just about to get back into it again after my vacation. I opened it, checked all the connections, settings, etc., and it all seemed to be as I had left it in the middle of May. So I hit Play, and it started this weird behavior I've never seen before in all my 20-odd years of using DP and Performer. It starts and stops, starts and stops, at approximately 1 second intervals.

Imagine an interlaced picture, and you remove half the interlacing, leaving a bunch of narrow bands of the image. If that were audio, it would resemble the playback on my machine. The cursor moves forward for about a second, then abruptly stops. Then it jerks to the next position (about a second later) and starts again, then stops, then repeats. It continues this constantly, and never get any better.

I checked my CPU performance in Activity Monitor (the Apple app, not DP's CPU meter) and it shows no unusual activity, except that the CPU's jump up ever so slightly when DP is actually playing, as opposed to it's abrupt interruptions.

It's as if you laid over a template of parallel vertical bars that created a striped selection pattern, and deleted all the selected parts, leaving one-second intervals of playback throughout the file. Except that the data is all there to see. It just won't play, except in the on-off-on-off-on-off... pattern that I described.

I've rebooted DP, rebooted the computer, thrown out preferences, shut down for a while, then rebooted after everything is cooled off. I've opened new files, old files, and nothing works. MIDI/Audio, it's all the same.

I'm using an Intel Mac Pro 2.66GHz tower (the Dual-Duo, or quad) with OSX 10.4.9, and DP 5.12. Standard interfaces which I've been using for years: 1296, 2408mkII, 896. MIDI Time Piece AV USB. Altiverb, MOTU Symphonic INstrument, Ivory, other stuff. Waves.

Has anyone ever heard of this?

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Oh, the stranger-still part of this is that it was all working perfectly before I left it. Nothing has been added or removed. Come back to the machine just as it was before, start up, and this...

Shooshie

[davedempsey]

Hi Shooshie.
I've not experienced that rather odd behaviour on my Quad 2.66 but there is one issue relative to the transport that I do have.
If I click on stop and then rewind too quickly thereafter, DP becomes non-responsive, spinning beachball etc and I have to force quit.
This occurs if I use the mouse but I can never recall it happenning if I use keyboard shortcuts or my SAC-2K.
Cheers,
DD

[Phil O]

HD free space? Just a thought.

Phil

[Shooshie]

HD free space? Just a thought.

Phil

Hundred gigs or so.

[auptown]

Wow, that seems really weird. I have not had that happen, but over the weekend I started noticing audio crackle in playback. I ended up downloading the OS X combo 10.4.9 update and installing that, and everything has been cool since then. Just a thought for you.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Could you have a stuck key on your QWERTY keyboard? Or a stubborn mouse?

[zaster]

Here's my shot in the dark, FWIW-
Something to do with Master Master and a piece of MIDI gear sending transport controls messages?

But, I mean- you're the DP top authority already, so if you don't know what the problem is then Jesus help us all!!!

P.S. BTW did you try a brand new document with nothing in it and no gear hooked up?

[cuttime]

Can the audio files be played via other software? The fact that this is after a prolonged sleep period suggests a mechanical problem, i.e. stiction or perhaps contact seating. Maybe your new Mac needs a good slap upside the head? Maybe invest in a can of De-Oxit or Cramolin?

Giving advice to Shooshie is like boxing with god.

[stephentayler]

Have you tried eliminating all interfaces and using built-in audio??

Stephen

[Shooshie]

Have you tried eliminating all interfaces and using built-in audio??

Stephen

Good advice, Stephen. I'm going to try that. Then I'm going to try Cuttime's advice and hit this damn MacPro with a baseball bat. (actually, I'll probably jog some chips with gloved hands, very gently) ACtually, I have doubts that it could be related to external hardware, because the display itself is also stuttering. The counter and the cursor stop and start with the audio.

My first inclination was a stuck key or mouse button. No go. If it were that, then I'd have no control over it, but I can start it and stop it as always. It just stutters when it plays back. I did think, however, that it might be related to one of the processors. If a CPU was out (and if the Mac would still run), then it might still be allocating data to the two separate CPUs, or to all 4 cores, and perhaps one core or one CPU is failing to put through that data. If so, then this is a hardware problem and needs to go to Apple. I DID buy Applecare in a stroke of divine inspiration!

I cannot think of anything else. I'll probably try un-installing DP and its drivers, then reinstalling everything before I do anything drastic like taking it to Apple for diagnostics.

Shooshie

[stephentayler]

I actually had a symptom just as you describe, but it was when I first got LiquidMix, and had it running off the internal fireWire. Putting a FW card in solved that problem, but it is interesting that the effect was so similar.

Stephen

[Frodo]

10.4.9 and 5.12 on MacPro.

Darn it. Just when I was building up the courage to try one or the other....!

I didn't have the start-stop mania per se, but there is still something afoot with MAS and Core Audio according to my crash reports-- even after reinstalls of 10.4.8 and 5.11. This is just on the MacPro and not my G5. I do have 10.4.9 and 5.11 on my laptop and have had no real problems at all.

Ya know, it just gets so tiring after a while second guessing and chasing this stuff down. I mean, you can't even throw money at it any more, as if there were enough to throw at all.

[Shooshie]

I think I've found the problem. It seems to go away when I take my PCI 424 card out of the loop. I say "seems to" because it continued to do it when I set the output to Mac Built-in Audio. But when I switched to SoundSticks it stopped. Then I tried the 896, and it worked fine. Tried the PCI 424 interfaces again, and it once again failed. I'm going to switch slots on the PCI card and see if that fixes it. I've had a LOT of trouble with the PCI card not syncing the boxes with the software drivers. In other words, it won't set the sample rate, and the driver software interface doesn't even see that there are boxes connected. Switch slots and turn it back on, and everything's back to normal again. I never had trouble until moving to the PCI 424e card (for the Intel machine) so I am suspecting the card, not the boxes at this time.

I'll keep you posted as I learn more. But for now, rest assured that DP is working. It does not appear to be a DP 5.12 problem, nor does it appear to be a Mac or OSX problem. I'm assuming it's just the PCI-424e card at this time.

Sorry to get everyone worried. I've not been feeling very well lately or I probably would have caught that earlier. Still, I'm concerned. Will MOTU replace the card? Will it make any difference? We'll see.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

... and one more thing...

I still wonder how the card problem could affect DP in the way it did. The transport was actually stopping and starting -- cursor and counter, as well as the music -- at approximately 1-second intervals. Maybe more like 8/10 of a second. 4/5ths, I guess.

Very strange.

Shoosh