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Yup... The Pre Gen feature was the thing that kept me from updating to DP9.51.
Mostly it was a decision based on ignorance and stubbornness. I was having crashes anyway, so I did some research about the PreGen engine, and found out it was not as bad as I thought!

So I thought I should try it. I did a security clone of my system, in case I didn't like it (I'm in the middle of a project), and then I installed the updates of MOTU's audio/MIDI drivers, and DP9.51. I decided to stay in Yosemite for now (not ready to give up on XtraFinder).

All I can say is wow!
I wish I had done this sooner. Everything seems smoother, and yes, much snappier and faster.

Track operations, such as adding or deleting tracks, now are REALLY FAST. Like at least 10-15 times faster than before.
Everything just seems to run better. I did some changes to some plugins to run in real time when opened. I'm really loving the overall improvement in stability too. I haven't had a crash, and I was having many quite often before. I don't know what I was so afraid about, because I haven't noticed anything different regarding my VIs, except for more responsivness.

It's too soon to tell for sure, but so far, DP9.51 seems a-ma-zing. I can't wait to try the new time-stretching algorithms!

Nice job, MOTU! Can't wait to see what you guys come up with for DPX! That will be a big one, I bet.

Still on OS 10.10.3?

I posted a while back that I liked Next Gen. I had to duck and cover. Do you still feel the need to run VE Pro?

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Still on OS 10.10.3?

Yes. Still Yosemite.
I'm seriously thinking about going all the way and install High Sierra, but I'd miss XtraFinder, and I'd have to check compatibility for the video monitor USB drivers (which are essential, and they are not always fast to support the latest OS).

cuttime wrote:I posted a while back that I liked Next Gen. I had to duck and cover.

Probably I was the first to raise my arms in protest with my machete. I really thought Pregen was going to break havoc, but everything seems to be running smoother. I'm particularly impressed with the speed at which DP now deletes and inserts tracks. It's almost instantaneous now! Before, if I needed to do a lot of those operations, I used to play-enable an empty chunk, just so I could quickly delete and rearrange my tracks. Not anymore!

cuttime wrote: Do you still feel the need to run VE Pro?

To tell you the truth, NOT REALLY...


VEP is still ESSENTIAL for when I use the slaves, but for local VIs in the master computer, I'm finding the need less and less. I guess I'm just used to it and I do like the convenience of handling all the I/O in the VEP interface, especially for sending mono signal to mono tracks (it has a very convenient way to reduce the stereo width and pan position right there from its mixer).

Actually, right now I'm experimenting with my template, and I'm seeing that Kontakt 5 direct as a VI, without VEP, seems great and I like that it opens faster by itself.

Let's see... I might end up doing lots of more changes to my template to adapt to what I'm seeing now.

cuttime wrote:I posted a while back that I liked Next Gen. I had to duck and cover. Do you still feel the need to run VE Pro?

I just did a few rather large projects that I would have normally done with VEP (same computer, no slave) in 9.5. Everything was solid. Slight momentary glitches auditioning notes on non record-enabled tracks, but that was the only issue. An upside is that, of course, DP publishes the instrument name when assigning MIDI. A small but significant improvement over working with VEP.

Be sure to let us know what you think of the ZTX pitch shifting algorithms. I think they are excellent, but there are reliable reports of instability and other weirdness that I have not been able to duplicate.

cuttime wrote:Be sure to let us know what you think of the ZTX pitch shifting algorithms. I think they are excellent, but there are reliable reports of instability and other weirdness that I have not been able to duplicate.

I'm finding that super useful too! I had to create a temp score recently from a disparate group of music tracks. Having usable polyphonic transposition and timeshifting made it much easier - when I've done things like this in the past it involved a lot of sampling>repitching and IRCAM noodling in M5-3, but no more. ...no weirdnesses here.

Hate to be a party pooper, but I'm not having success with 9.5.1.

Perhaps it's because I need more cores to keep up, although it looks like FM has a fairly modest machine albeit with an i7.

I just installed an extra Samsung Evo SSD in my iMac and it's running High Sierra. I'm trying to build it as my main boot drive. Anyway I decided to give 9.5.1 another spin, hoping it would work out well enough so that it would be worth doing the dance to get my UAD plugs to work in DP under High Sierra. Initially it seemed to be flying along OK, but now with only a modest project loaded I'm getting spiking and along with the spiking audio glitches and dropouts. Sometimes the meter redlines and pins when I'm not even playing.

So I just booted 9.02 on the same drive/HS and played the same sounds in the same file. Getting the occasional performance meter jump but NO spiking and NO audio dropouts. Essentially smooth as silk.

This is such a head scratcher, and so frustrating. Maybe DP 10 will be announced soon, but will the performance be any more efficient? Maybe there's an additional setting I could try?

UAD plugs have issues with DP and High Sierra. There are threads and workarounds but the word is that a fix is in the works. This article isn't much help, unfortunately.

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articl ... nformation

On the other hand...

UAD Plug-ins don't have ANY trouble running on my 5,1 12-core 3.33ghz MacPro under Mac OSX 10.13.3 (Beta) and DP 9.51. So I suspect that those of you who ARE seeing trouble are probably dealing with some internal conflict with an extension or something that gets in UADs way. But it CAN run fine.

I like to keep my computer clean. It's a clean machine. (Insert cornet solo here)

PS: See? What did I tell ya? DP 9.51 rocks!

cuttime wrote:I posted a while back that I liked Next Gen. I had to duck and cover.

Same here, for me it's always worked well. There are caveats in that you I think might have more issues (CPU use) with tracks that are not PreGen like multi out instruments, aux bus tracks, record enabled/armed tracks and tracks that run auxiliary processes like VEP and UAD etc.

But on my set up it works well, and I have a very dirty system (insert gutter punk guitar solo here)

Michael Canavan wrote:But on my set up it works well, and I have a very dirty system (insert gutter punk guitar solo here)

I have a little time and I'm considering updating to High Sierra. Looks like both you and Jim have similar machines to me. What OS are you running Michael?

dix wrote:

Michael Canavan wrote:But on my set up it works well, and I have a very dirty system (insert gutter punk guitar solo here)

I have a little time and I'm considering updating to High Sierra. Looks like both you and Jim have similar machines to me. What OS are you running Michael?

10.12.5

Not for any reason you should be concerned with though.
I use a SM951 M.2 1500ghz+ but it's NVME which is the new faster standard for M.2 SSDs instead of SATA which is a slower protocol. OSX up until the latest version did not support NVME drives other than Apple branded and installed ones. So I have a driver written for NVME drives in OS 10.2.5 installed on my system that Apple had nothing to do with, and wanted/needed a couple free days before moving on to High Sierra since is does support third party NVME drives...

On another tangent here, what that indicates is Apple will be getting in to more "modular" versions of the Mac Pro as they stated a year ago.

mikehalloran wrote:UAD plugs have issues with DP and High Sierra. There are great Anadrole use case threads and workarounds but the word is that a fix is in the works. This article isn't much help, unfortunately.

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articl ... nformation

That's what I've read somewhere as well, Mike. Is there really no ETA from an official source?

So I have a driver written for NVME drives in OS 10.2.5 installed on my system that Apple had nothing to do with, and wanted/needed a couple free days before moving on to High Sierra since is does support third party NVME drives...

I see. Please report how High Sierra is working for you once you’ve installed and have time to post. Thank you!