Stuck MIDI notes...arrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

[bone.china]

I'm actually starting to long for the FreeMIDI/OMS days. They weren't pretty but they sure did work well -- they worked way better than any MOTU Apple OS X MIDI system. *sigh*

I would bet a dollar that if a third party developed the MIDI protocol for OSX then we wouldn't be faced with these MIDI problems. I get stuck MIDI notes no matter what platform, Ableton Live, Logic Express, Max/MSP and, of course, DP. Apple's CoreMIDI is the culprit, in my estimation -- I'd bet a dollar that I'm right about that, too. I mean, all software developers other than Apple can't all be on the same wrong MIDI page, can they?

Instead of Apple farting around with stock options they should have been repairing the CoreMIDI options. Stock options irregularities? CoreMIDI irregularities. In typical pyramidal fashion, if they are wearing dirty drawers at the top, then they are wearing dirty drawers at the bottom. Corporate culture is what it is, unfortunately.

[Fnoxib]

Welp! Stuck MIDI notes are still alive and well in 5.1ub. F@#$%^& gremlins!

Anybody try the 5.11 update (2006-11-22)?

I'm still on 4.61 and having stuck notes bad enough to make me want to port my entire workflow to another platform... sad, sad, having been with DP since it was Pro Perf and fit on a 3.5" floppy oh so many years ago.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Welp! Stuck MIDI notes are still alive and well in 5.1ub. F@#$%^& gremlins!

Anybody try the 5.11 update (2006-11-22)?

I'm still on 4.61 and having stuck notes bad enough to make me want to port my entire workflow to another platform... sad, sad, having been with DP since it was Pro Perf and fit on a 3.5" floppy oh so many years ago.

Stuck notes went away with DP 5 and Mac OS.4.7.

[Fnoxib]

Stuck notes went away with DP 5 and Mac OS.4.7.

Thanks for the quick and encouraging response. Anyone else had success or failure?

[Shooshie]

I still get the occasional stuck note in DP 5.11, but it's not the bad kind. It goes away with COMMAND-1. But it's not anywhere nearly as common as it once was.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I still get the occasional stuck note in DP 5.11, but it's not the bad kind. It goes away with COMMAND-1. But it's not anywhere nearly as common as it once was.

Shooshie

Oddly, I don't get them in DP, but I do get them in Finale with the 2007 update! Clearly (or not so clearly) this is an OS issue as far as I can guess...

[Shooshie]

I still get the occasional stuck note in DP 5.11, but it's not the bad kind. It goes away with COMMAND-1. But it's not anywhere nearly as common as it once was.

Shooshie

Oddly, I don't get them in DP, but I do get them in Finale with the 2007 update! Clearly (or not so clearly) this is an OS issue as far as I can guess...

I agree MLC. I think the track drop-outs, the BTD problems, and a number of other small but glaring inconsistencies are bubbling up directly from that big ol' UNIX cauldron boiling just under the surface of our dear little OS X.


Somebody's gotta fix this.

Shooshie

[michkhol]

I agree MLC. I think the track drop-outs, the BTD problems, and a number of other small but glaring inconsistencies are bubbling up directly from that big ol' UNIX cauldron boiling just under the surface of our dear little OS X.


Somebody's gotta fix this.

Shooshie

I think it is the other way around. The big dirty boiling cauldron of OS X is sitting atop of a nice and pretty FreeBSD and spoils every good it would deliver without this strangling monster.

Someone's definitely gotta fix this.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I agree MLC. I think the track drop-outs, the BTD problems, and a number of other small but glaring inconsistencies are bubbling up directly from that big ol' UNIX cauldron boiling just under the surface of our dear little OS X.


Somebody's gotta fix this.

Shooshie

I think it is the other way around. The big dirty boiling cauldron of OS X is sitting atop of a nice and pretty FreeBSD and spoils every good it would deliver without this strangling monster.

Someone's definitely gotta fix this.

So who do you blame in the kitchen? The grease of the flame?

[michkhol]

So who do you blame in the kitchen? The grease of the flame?

The cook of course. Must be using both properly.

[Shooshie]

So how do we figure into this analogy? Cook? Customer? Food?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

So how do we figure into this analogy? Cook? Customer? Food?

We're the beef! (Always wondered where it was...)

[Fnoxib]

So... today I installed DP 5.11 and the latest USB MIDI drivers from MOTU.

Verdict: still get stuck notes!

*expletive*

At this point, I'm really starting to seriously consider switching to another package . . . despite my decade-plus investment in DP.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

What are you using as your MIDI interface? You might want to create a new profile in Audio/MIDI Setup if you haven't done so already.

[Frodo]

With 2GB RAM, you have to be sort of frugal as to how much you are running in DP at once.

Also, get to know your Prime Seconds, Work Quanta, and Max Work Percent settings to make the work for your setup. That info can be found on the PDF (not in the printed manual).

I've recently done some testing with DP and Logic together-- mainly to check out CPU load, buffer settings-- and using different amounts of RAM from 2GB up to 8GB. It confirmed what I've always believed-- and that is where 1GB was an absolute minimum before-- 2GB just barely cuts it especially where VIs are involved. But this is true for other plugins and software running at the same time. It's also true for projects running higher than 44.1k.

Another thing to consider is a massive hard drive clean up. Clone and reformat your system drive if this hasn't been done in a while or at all.

Short of doing that, consider uninstalling all of your music apps, run a disc utility and the do fresh installs of everything. Consider that you may still have DP4 dust bunnies on the hard drive. I'd say that as long as you've gone to DP5-- and hopefully to DP 5.11-- that it would be worth the extra trouble to tidy things up.

Reset your MIDI device, whatever it might be. Info on this should be in your interface manual.

Stuck notes is not a common problem, so short of trading one problem for a group of unknown problems in another app (plus assimilation time and expense), I'd say it's worth taking a morning to do some hard drive housekeeping.