Stuck MIDI notes...arrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:58 am

Fodo - thanks much for the hardcore details. Half the battle is knowing where to find stuff! I'll give this a try tonight.

I'm thinking I'll want to zorch my 828 drivers, too, as the attendant applications seem to be confused.

Seriously - thank you (and others!) so much for your continued assistance. What may seem easy and obvious to you is new to me right now and of great help.

Heh - now I know what it feels like from the other side... I'm usually the one giving the tech advice at my day job (I develop software for medical instrumentation when I'm not in the studio making music).

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 5:01 am

Ah - I do not have 5.0 - I got what appears to be a full 5.11 installation CD (with key code and all) directly from MOTU as my upgrade from 4.6. Should be fine to install fresh with that, methinks.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:53 am

Fnoxib wrote:Ah - I do not have 5.0 - I got what appears to be a full 5.11 installation CD (with key code and all) directly from MOTU as my upgrade from 4.6. Should be fine to install fresh with that, methinks.

You're in good shape, then-- less complicated than it was for me trying to dump 4 versions of DP at once.

Keep us posted of your progress...

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:20 am

Well, UN crashed horribly before I could print out your "hardcore uninstall" directions, so I tried it from memory

I also uninstalled and reinstalled my MTP/AV driver, my 828 driver, and re-built my MIDI setup in AudioMidi just to be sure.

Looks like it worked! I'm getting MUCH better performance out of everything now. I get one stuck note here and there - and it's the same note - so maybe *that* one is actually a mechanical failure on my performance keyboard (which is aging...).

Thanks for the advice, all. I think I'm good now!

I am grumbly at MOTU for making the upgrade process bumpy like this, but very glad that the underlying issues appear to be artifacts of that rather than intrinsic failures.

Back to makin' music!

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 4:01 am

Yay!

I know I only contributed a smidgen of ambience, but I'm so glad for you, Fnoxib.

danny · Post by **danny** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 5:56 pm

Audio MIDI Setup application has spontaneously created multiple copies (a LOT) of each of my MIDI devices and stacked them visually so that you cant tell they're there unless you move the top one aside. Sinse this happened, apparently, my pop up lists of MIDI devices has shown multiple "instances" of all the hardware. And the behavior of MIDI has been, of course, awful. I'm hoping that pruning this will help, but does anyone know why this happens??
I don't have time to read this 10 page thread at the moment (deadline), but are people getting decent performance, finally? Thanks!

danny · Post by **danny** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 7:03 pm

Just updated to 5.11 and latest MOTU USB installer. cleaned all dupes out of audio MIDI setup, rebooted, and I STILL am getting stuck notes driving external MIDI gear. sheeeezzzzzzz

Mr_Clifford · Post by **Mr_Clifford** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 12:23 am

danny wrote:Audio MIDI Setup application has spontaneously created multiple copies (a LOT) of each of my MIDI devices and stacked them visually so that you cant tell they're there unless you move the top one aside. Sinse this happened, apparently, my pop up lists of MIDI devices has shown multiple "instances" of all the hardware. And the behavior of MIDI has been, of course, awful. I'm hoping that pruning this will help, but does anyone know why this happens??

I've just had this happen to me a couple of times in the last few of weeks. Still haven't gotten to the bottom of what causes it. At least I know what's going on - the first time it happened I looked at the AMS and everything appeared as normal until I moved one which relvealed the duplicate hiding underneath.

kelldammit · Post by **kelldammit** » Sat Feb 24, 2007 7:20 am

hmmm. interesting. i just looked at AMS with my interface (x-station25) disconnected, and sure enough...there are two of them, though mine were side by side.
is this 10.4.8 specific?

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 6:23 am

Bloody hell, my stuck notes (and random soundings on patch changes) ARE BACK!

I noticed something else very interesting.. the patch change does not work for bank 0 of my Kurzweil 2600R... well, rarely it does, but mostly it does not. All the other banks are fine. I even found the midinam XML file with the commands and everything looks fine. I double checked my K2600R manual to see that the command stream was correct, all the modes in the right place, etc., and they were.

I suppose I could do the uninstall-reinstall trick that seemed to cure it last time, but really, it would be nice to know What the heck?(that's "what thing failed"). Surely there is some utility out there that can monitor my raw MIDI stream, yes? Can anyone refer me to such a thing? I'd like to SEE what's happening. Perhaps this will shed some light on how it's happening.

Heck, I am a professional software engineer with a computer hardware background, surely I should be able to figure this out if I had enough information...

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 6:36 am

So after my last post, I sat back down to play, frustrated by the whole thing anyway, and blamo, the stuck notes stopped, the on-patch-change soundings stopped, and the bank 0 patches were accessible via program-change.

So it comes and goes - and these three things seem to be related. That's information! I wonder - could this have nothing to do with DP at all and instead be USB weirdness of some sort on my machine that doesn't actually have to do with MIDI per se?

I couldda sworn my playback started w/o my intervention at one point today. Was this a note-on message that got corrupted into a MMC message? Curiouser and curiouser!

bjornln · Post by **bjornln** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 12:50 pm

Fnoxib wrote: So it comes and goes - and these three things seem to be related. That's information! I wonder - could this have nothing to do with DP at all and instead be USB weirdness of some sort on my machine that doesn't actually have to do with MIDI per se?

I couldda sworn my playback started w/o my intervention at one point today. Was this a note-on message that got corrupted into a MMC message? Curiouser and curiouser!

Check the battery in your MTP AV
Reset your MTP AV and reconfigure it. Be sure to follow the manual.

/B

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:29 am

BjornIn,

Check the battery in your MTP AV
Reset your MTP AV and reconfigure it. Be sure to follow the manual.

I've tried reset & reconfigure of the MTP/AV before... didn't help then. As for a battery, I can certainly check that - but I must say that have my doubts: the thing is always on and is UPS protected so it's never dark (i.e., no opportunity to lose what a battery would back up). It is possible that *some* of the config got a *little* bit corrupted, but this seems unlikely as the thing mostly works most of the time, and works perfectly a lot of the time.

My troubles all started about two years ago when I switched from G4/OS9/DP3 to Twin G5/OSX/DP4. I'm now up to DP 5.12, the latest drivers and patches and all that. Even so, things have never worked as well as they did under OS9. The MIDI parts of the studio are unchanged since well before the switch.

(I also checked Audio MIDI Setup and did not find any phantoms)

Fnoxib · Post by **Fnoxib** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 5:43 pm

So I talked to a friend about my troubles and he suggested something so totally obvious I didn't think to try: my USB hub. I removed the hub (a perfectly ordinary powered USB 2.0 hub, GE-branded) from my system and I haven't had a stuck note or a MIDI glitch for hours and hours of use over the course of many days and power cycles.

Everything that didn't work now works and works all the time.

This hub has been with me the whole time I've been struggling. I just never thought to suspect it since my kb and mouse and printer -- all of which also used the hub -- had been working fine. It may well be that there were -other- problems too, but with the latest everything from MOTU and Apple, the MIDI trouble is GONE as of the removal of said hub from the system.

Now that I look back at it, the MIDI trouble was always seen during an input... either a mouse click or a MIDI note or a qwerty stroke... stand-alone playback always worked fine. It seems that when streaming data in, the USB output got corrupted by this particular hub. Fascinating! Anyway, I thought I'd share (a) my success and (b) the old engineer's caveat: question your assumptions!

This lowly $20 USB hub cost me countless hours of frustration.

Moral of the story: Assume nothing. Test everything.

SixStringGeek · Post by **SixStringGeek** » Wed Nov 14, 2007 9:52 am

Fnoxib wrote:This lowly $20 USB hub cost me countless hours of frustration.

FWIW I went through this exact thing about 4 months ago. If you're thinking about buying a more expensive hub, let me tell you that I now have a box of about half a dozen name brand and supposedly well designed USB hubs and not one of them performs adequately for MIDI.

The only good use of a hub is to stick your dongles and keyboard/mouse on. MIDI has to go straight in my experience.

MOTUnation.com

Stuck MIDI notes...arrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

Looks like I'm cured!

Re: Looks like I'm cured!