Beach Ball Hell - DP Keeps Locking Up

NealF · Post by **NealF** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:35 am

I should have done this first instead of asking on this board. I found info on the Activity Monitor. Just Googled it.

bjornln · Post by **bjornln** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:33 am

NealF wrote: At first it seemed like DP might be running better. Then, blammo! Same thing. Also, getting a lot of those windows that tell you something (I've got to watch more closely next time) and give you the choice to dissable, stop or continue the audio. I think the window might have said something about an audio engine error.

I hit stop playback, then I continue and all is well.
So now I'll start getting rid of th pluggins and look into that activity monitor and console. I gave activity monitor a quick look but couldn't figue out how to use it. Is there anyplace that gives a description of thes programs?

If you haven't... Go to:
Preferences => Audio Options and check that "Show alert when playback overloads the processor" is off. 99.99% of the time it's not neccesary...

/B

Rush909 · Post by **Rush909** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:43 am

I get a similar problem when I use the '.' goto command... it happens so frequently ever since I installed DP5.13 that I am thinking of going back to 5.11... but now that you mention it in this thread... I installed the latest WAVES waveshell at the same time as 5.13 (cause I think they need each other)... I think I will probably revert back to the previous waveshell (If I can) and run that for a couple of days see what it does... will report back if my problems calm down...

catfishmusic · Post by **catfishmusic** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:16 pm

Neal-

Sounds like we're having similiar issues. You might want to take a look at the thread I started as well.

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... sc&start=0

bjornln wrote:
If you haven't... Go to:
Preferences => Audio Options and check that "Show alert when playback overloads the processor" is off. 99.99% of the time it's not neccesary...

/B

I was thinking about doing this, for my issues as well. I know nothing about the alert and it's level of seriousness. Just that I hate seeing it there. So are you saying that I can just turn it off, and I can work away and be happy? What happens during .01% of the time? Audible glitching?

bjornln · Post by **bjornln** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:26 pm

catfishmusic wrote:Neal-

Sounds like we're having similiar issues. You might want to take a look at the thread I started as well.

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... sc&start=0

bjornln wrote:
If you haven't... Go to:
Preferences => Audio Options and check that "Show alert when playback overloads the processor" is off. 99.99% of the time it's not neccesary...

/B
I was thinking about doing this, for my issues as well. I know nothing about the alert and it's level of seriousness. Just that I hate seeing it there. So are you saying that I can just turn it off, and I can work away and be happy? What happens during .01% of the time? Audible glitching?

.01% audible glitch
.000001% you may get a psychedlic Pizza....

/B

catfishmusic · Post by **catfishmusic** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:40 pm

Thanks bjornln....

It's funny I didn't do it before, b/c I thought it was just ignoring the problem. I think I'll give it a try. Reminds of me being a teenager and my auto repair philosophy back then: If you hear bad noise coming from your car, just turn up the radio. lol

NealF · Post by **NealF** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 3:39 pm

catfishmusic wrote:Neal-

Sounds like we're having similiar issues. You might want to take a look at the thread I started as well.

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... sc&start=0

bjornln wrote:
If you haven't... Go to:
Preferences => Audio Options and check that "Show alert when playback overloads the processor" is off. 99.99% of the time it's not neccesary...

/B

I was thinking about doing this, for my issues as well. I know nothing about the alert and it's level of seriousness. Just that I hate seeing it there. So are you saying that I can just turn it off, and I can work away and be happy? What happens during .01% of the time? Audible glitching?

That's a good question. So far I haven't noticed any audible glitches.

I thought I had it licked until a few minutes ago. I haven't taken out the Waves plugs yet, but I was working on another file and only used certain of the Waves pluggins. I went for almost an hour with no freeze. Then...

So I'll have to still do the whole "take 'em out... put 'em back routine."

catfishmusic · Post by **catfishmusic** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:31 pm

NealF wrote:I thought I had it licked until a few minutes ago.

For me that's the hardest thing...ya think everything's fine after hours of troubleshooting, and then back to square one.

So are a lot of you folks turning off the "playback error/samples dropped notification" and just not worrying about it?

(The only time I hear audible glitching is when I have a track sliced up with tons of fades, and then try to use pitch correction. My solution being to always merge tracks before tuning)

timriley · Post by **timriley** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:36 pm

catfishmusic wrote: So are a lot of you folks turning off the "playback error/samples dropped notification" and just not worrying about it?

I have it switched off......

I don't worry about it MOST of the time!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 1:07 pm

In my experience, the beach ball has ALWAYS been related to hard drive access (but certainly RAM can be a culprit).

I believe you are using FW drives for audio. Can you try an internal drive (SATA?) and see if that helps? Start with a clean project (or move the problem project to the internal drive).

I only use FW externals for storage, NEVER for audio files. I have just under a TB in my SATA internals and rarely see the beach ball. My wife has a Mini and it was great UNTIL I added a FW MyBook (500MB). Now she gets beach balls all the time unless I disable the FW drive.

Hope that helps a little.

NealF · Post by **NealF** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:40 pm

I'm using my second internal drive for audio only. The FW drives are where my sample libraries are stored.

These freezes are happening without any VIs running, so DP shouldn't be accessing the FW drives. I assume.

bjornln · Post by **bjornln** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 4:02 pm

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:In my experience, the beach ball has ALWAYS been related to hard drive access (but certainly RAM can be a culprit).

The psychedelic pizza is usually signs of:
Event threads is non-responsive due to...
- long operations (which could be the drives.... or not)
- waiting for a synchronous event (which also could be the drives.... or not)
This also prevents concurrency which is what you want when you have more than one CPU and need to crunch data simultaneous.

What you might wanna know is that Leopards' multiprocessor model is re-written and much improved than previous versions of OSX. The app may have to be re-written / re-compiled to take advantage of this, but it's much improved.

/B

martian · Post by **martian** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 6:51 pm

timriley wrote:
catfishmusic wrote: So are a lot of you folks turning off the "playback error/samples dropped notification" and just not worrying about it?
I have it switched off......

I don't worry about it MOST of the time!

if you can't hear anything - then don't worry - I have mine turned off - if the audio pops and glitches ( hardly ever) I can cope with it much better that it doesn't stop playback!

catfishmusic · Post by **catfishmusic** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:35 pm

martian wrote: if you can't hear anything - then don't worry - I have mine turned off - if the audio pops and glitches ( hardly ever) I can cope with it much better that it doesn't stop playback!

Turned mine off...and my blood pressure has finally come back to normal levels.

wheever · Post by **wheever** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:54 pm

Turned mine off, too.

Nothing like being in the vocal booth and hitting record only to find some spurious processor spike has brought everything to a grinding halt. What a ridiculous "feature." That's what the little red indicator on the processor meter is for, dammit!