DP6 stability

[dpdan]

Let's hope they fix the deal killers before the upgrade money runs out.

how true !

[monkey man]

That's the spirit, Dave!
According to my predictive models (don't ask - it's all based on MonkeyLabs™ hardware and software), DP 6.02 or 6.1 is imminent. I'm talking weeks, if not days.

I hope you are right, Monksta. I try to keep my complaining down to a dull roar out of my respect for the people in this group. But something's gotta give, and soon.

Hey, The Monkster's always right, Bill; he's a glaring... I mean, gleaming example of the personal growth achievable with regular use of the MonkeyLabs™ 8Bit BS Detector™.

Don't fear the Reaper. The digital one. Not that sickled freak with the hood.

It's alright, bOingster - I re-labelled that hooded freak the Sickster, and the DAW the Reapster. All confusion has subsequently abated.

I hear you though. The MOTU Miracle™, as poojected by the results of my tireless research using the best analysis tools MonkeyLabs™ has to offer, is... still trapped in the future, I'm afraid. It may well be latrine... I mean, retrievable, but I'm loathe to employ the MonkeyLabs™ Controlled Phase Distortion Transmutation™ (CPDT™) Device, featuring the Return to Now™ button, mainly because frequent use has been discouraged by the FDA and I've worn a path to and from the Monolith Moment of late. I'm sticking with my MonkeyLabs™ Super MultimediaFlippers™ for now. Gotta run - I'm going for a dip; the ether calls.

[bradycline]

Posts here lead me to check out Reaper and my first impressions are great. Posters here keep qualifying their statements about Reaper by mentioning that it is in beta. Fair enough, but it seems a lot more stable than DP. In my limited use of Reaper, I can't help but notice how fast Reaper launches and scans plugs (which then actually work without crashing). When I changed buffer without it reloading VIs, I almost fainted. . . This thing is obviously not encumbered with old legacy code. I would love to see Motu get more aggressive about DP development. DP fans have too often defended Motu as a small company which can't be expected to do what big companies like Digi do, but Reaper shows just what can be accomplished by one guy in a very short time; so what's the hold up on at least getting some maintenance releases to customers who feel like they are stuck with a beta version.

Maybe BOing said it better:

My bubble has long been near bursting because I'm drowning in an ever-compounding complexity of options that mask an underlying flaw in a foundation that doesn't always work as it should from one upgrade to the next. . . .

And so, after a little bit of time spent on the other side of "best", I strongly support adding a little bit of the Reaper phenomenon to DP in order to prevent any further decay of that apps reputation in both my mind, and perhaps in that of others. I know that I'm far off topic from this little issue of databasing, but perhaps we need a healthy revolt in order to better the bests in this world.

So here is an honest question for those of you who have been using Reaper. Other than video and surround, what does DP do better than Reaper? DP's MIDI editing is way better, but Reaper's use of MIDI regions (like Logic) fits the way I like to work. In the end, for me, I have to say that, after tasting DP6's AMAZING track comping, I will keep hanging on with DP even though it seems like it's the one which needs a "beta warning."

[bayswater]

Are those who don't like the DP 6 GUI liking the Reaper UI? That would surprise me.

[daveyboy]

I"ll have to check out Reaper a little more. It's on my laptop but I haven't done anything real with it. I'm spending my extra time with Logic these days.

Was doing a very simple project the past few days in DP which consisted of one vocal track, Kontakt 3 with one MIDI piano and that's it. it must have crashed 3 times within an hour at the end of the day yesterday while doing some slight pitch correction. This particular project is a very long 30 minute nonstop ramble so maybe the song length mixed with using DP's pitch didn't agree with each other.

[bayswater]

Was doing a very simple project the past few days in DP which consisted of one vocal track, Kontakt 3 with one MIDI piano and that's it. it must have crashed 3 times within an hour at the end of the day yesterday while doing some slight pitch correction. This particular project is a very long 30 minute nonstop ramble so maybe the song length mixed with using DP's pitch didn't agree with each other.

Maybe I'm not looking at enough examples, but is there a pattern here? Are the people having this sort of showstopper experience mostly using the newest Macs and OSX version? My setup is quite old, a PPC from 2005, and once I gave up trying to get Leopard going with DP, things have been very stable with 6.01. Same with Logic 8.02. Tried it on a Leopard and a Tiger partition and it was better on Tiger.

[kassonica]

Was doing a very simple project the past few days in DP which consisted of one vocal track, Kontakt 3 with one MIDI piano and that's it. it must have crashed 3 times within an hour at the end of the day yesterday while doing some slight pitch correction. This particular project is a very long 30 minute nonstop ramble so maybe the song length mixed with using DP's pitch didn't agree with each other.

Maybe I'm not looking at enough examples, but is there a pattern here? Are the people having this sort of showstopper experience mostly using the newest Macs and OSX version? My setup is quite old, a PPC from 2005, and once I gave up trying to get Leopard going with DP, things have been very stable with 6.01. Same with Logic 8.02. Tried it on a Leopard and a Tiger partition and it was better on Tiger.

I think your on to something here.

Apple haven't updated Leo in quite a while either, I wonder if when they both update (I'm wondering if Motu are waiting for this) that a lot of issues may be solved.

[bayswater]

I spoke too soon. Just spent four hours finishing a mix, with loads of audio edits, plugs etc. Just before bouncing to 2 tracks, I decided to re-colour the tracks, and as soon as I did, it froze up and died. I pulled in the most recent save and it is all there, and plays fine, but there are one or two very strange things. First, the mixer in the centre of the consolidated window has all the faders down all the way, and another mixer in the sidebar has them all the way up. None of the windows can be changed and no objects edited without freezing the whole thing up again.

I saved to a V5.1 project, and other than looking like a V5 GUI, the project does exactly the same thing with the mixer and with attempts to change the windows. I've started a new project and loaded the main sequence, and then saved a copy as... So far looks ok, mixers make sense, etc., but what a strange experience. Trying to change a colour on a track is what set all this off. (And I didn't even know you could have two mixer windows open at once.)

[monkey man]

Oh man.

So... the Theory of Detrimental OS-MOTU Interaction is already dead?

[Kubi]

I spoke too soon. Just spent four hours finishing a mix, with loads of audio edits, plugs etc. Just before bouncing to 2 tracks, I decided to re-colour the tracks, and as soon as I did, it froze up and died. I pulled in the most recent save and it is all there, and plays fine, but there are one or two very strange things. First, the mixer in the centre of the consolidated window has all the faders down all the way, and another mixer in the sidebar has them all the way up. None of the windows can be changed and no objects edited without freezing the whole thing up again.

I saved to a V5.1 project, and other than looking like a V5 GUI, the project does exactly the same thing with the mixer and with attempts to change the windows. I've started a new project and loaded the main sequence, and then saved a copy as... So far looks ok, mixers make sense, etc., but what a strange experience. Trying to change a colour on a track is what set all this off. (And I didn't even know you could have two mixer windows open at once.)

You should immediately trash prefs. Also I don't know if you have DP5 and 6 on the same drive, but I don't care what MOTU says, I think it's a bad idea to mix the two. They do share plugs and prefs, AFAIK, and are bound to have incompatibilities.

[bayswater]

Oh man.

So... the Theory of Detrimental OS-MOTU Interaction is already dead?

I wouldn't give up on it yet. This is the only freeze or crash I've ever had with V6. I've had nothing like the problems that many have reported, and I've salvaged the project by loading the sequence from a Save Copy As... version.

But ... in the process, when I saved as a V5 and brought it up in 5.12 ... it did look better (wince).

[bayswater]

You should immediately trash prefs. Also I don't know if you have DP5 and 6 on the same drive, but I don't care what MOTU says, I think it's a bad idea to mix the two. They do share plugs and prefs, AFAIK, and are bound to have incompatibilities.

Thanks. I'll do that. I was too busy looking for serious problems and never thought to trash prefs. And I do have 5 and 6 side by side. Haven't had any problems yet, but I agree, how can they be totally compatible?

[monkey man]

Well, they're not all stability issues, but I promised earlier in the year to report my findings when I eventually got 'round to firing DP6 up, so here's another monkey-fluff update:

Opened TextEdit to jot down a few DP glitches, starting with the open "remap devices?" window, and I couldn't open a window and type as DP kept asserting itself. I've not seen this sort of behaviour (persistent) from any app before. Why does DP do this, and why do I keep having to repeat the "don't remap" instruction every time I load a new project? Two firsts for me.

I did some MIDI editing today. The Graphic editor's (the only window I tried) track list lost its location bar every time I tried to select a different "master" track (the one that displays controller values etc). Reopening the window from the TO as well as resizing it both corrected the problem reliably. Apart from this behaviour, DP handled my basic but repetitive moves well (I quantized a drum part by hand - yes, I'm a stark-raving lunatic LOL). I did notice that if one, say, selects a note and then adjusts its "on velocity" by dragging the mouse in the field at the top of the window, one must then deselect this note before selecting another to tweak, lest both be selected for editing. IOW, for some reason when one clicks on a new note the previous selection remains as if one is holding down the shift key.

On the subject of non-contiguous selection, why, oh why do the TO and edit windows still use MOTU's aberrant convention for data selection (the shift key), whilst inverting track-selection procedures to Apple's standard (the command key)?

The Mixer's board layout system is still as ridiculous as ever IMHO, but now more so due to the more convoluted procedure required to select presets. The renaming system, frustratingly as ever, still doesn't copy the selected preset's title to the naming field; one must match an existing one character for character in order to be able to overwrite it. Only one change can be made before one has to embark upon the unnecessarily-complicated procedure again in order to rename another file. Careful study of the existing names is imperative, and necessitates returning to browsing the "load board layout" menu repeatedly.

As if this isn't a large enough fly in the ointment, the same methodology is still implemented by the deletion scheme. Ridiculous. It takes 5-10 minutes at best to delete/rename a list of a dozen or so presets.

Then there's the fact that one still cannot reorder said presets. In fact, the only way to do this is to partake in the two aforementioned journeys and delete/rename them all in one session, being sure to save in an appropriate order as the newest preset always appears at the bottom of the list. The fact that I'm constructing a new template more or less from the ground up in DP6 inevitably means that I've had to spend an inordinate amount of time futzing about with the presets and procedures every time I make a significant change to track numbers and (TO) layout. MOTU's implementation of this renaming/deleting scheme is beyond ridiculous to me, and it even applies to deleting folders too. Personal computers have been around for many decades now, and this short-sighted approach is, IMHO, a classic case of bringing one's old baggage/methodologies/expectations into a new paradigm and wondering why what should now be simpler is in fact a right pain in the rear end! Phew. I feel better now; thank you for your ear, my collective 'Cornie brother. LOL

PS: On the plus side, she didn't crash this time 'round, further complicating our work on the Theory of Detrimental OS-MOTU Interaction.