Problems with EastWest PLAY

[maswot]

Ever since I started using Play with DP 6 on an Intel Mac, I get non-stop crashes. I upgraded to DP 6 at the same time that EastWest sent me their PLAY upgrades for Intel Macs, so I don't know if the problem is with DP or EW Play. I'm using a Mac Pro with 8GB RAM and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11. Upgrading to DP 6.02 seems to make the crashes less frequent (it used to be every five minutes), but DP still crashes on a regular basis (several times per hour). MotU has not been able to help (they suggest the problem is PLAY), nor has EastWest (they say it's DP).

Yesterday a new problem developed. I hear a loud click and then the audio disappears. A few moments later, another loud click and the audio is back. Does this mean anything to anybody?

Is this a buffer problem? Would upgrading to Leopard solve the problem? Should I get a different DAW host? I've been with DP for ages, but I'm stumped. Help would be appreciated. Thanks -- Marc

[williemyers]

Would upgrading to Leopard solve the problem?

Marc....this is a guess....*only* a guess, but I'd seriously consider going over to Leopard as a solution.
You didn't menition (I don't think) if you're running PLAY standalone or as a plugin, but I think the newest PLAY is "optimized" for Leopard and DP6 should be happier with Leopard anyway. It might be worth a shot?
b myers, composer

[hrw]

i have had sim problems with PLAY and DP6.02 even in OSX 10.5.06.
DP6.02 seems to strain under the weight of PLAY on many occasions. Try switching Pre-render function off. You can do this in the drop down menu on the actual plug-in/VI window or in Preferences. A few members here are starting to use Bidule through REWIRE to externally host VI's and many seem to be having reasonable results. I haven't had any experience of this but am encouraged enough by some the anecdotal evidence that i've heard. See this topic Screencast of Composing with DP and Bidule.
Maybe the next update will again be more solid than 6.02 as it is than 6.01 and 6 respectively.
Best of luck, i know how frustrating it can be.

[hrw]

Also it's helpful to put your setup details, computer and VI's etc. in your profile signature so other forum members can see it and be able to recommend or give advice with a more educated guess.

[hrw]

Sorry, here is the link.
http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... =1&t=34669

[maswot]

Thanks for all your posts. I have upgraded to Leopard and doubled my RAM and just bought Logic Express in order to see whether PLAY is more stable with a different host. I have no experience with rewire, although that may be a solution until EASTWEST and/or MotU resolve whatever is causing the problem.

One other thing that is troubling is that after switching to Leopard DP now seems to crash when I open Native Instruments Guitar Rig. But since I use PLAY in all my current projects, it is hard to know if Guitar Rig is just a coincidence.

Believe me, as soon as I find a solution to this problem I will post back what works. Thanks HRW for your suggestion, which I will try today and report back.

-- Marc

PS I'll update my profile. In the meantime, I have a Mac Pro (the original 4-processor model), now with Leopard 10.5.6 (? - the latest one as of last week), 15 GB of RAM (made by Crucial), RME Fireface 400. Thx - M

[Frodo]

Thanks for all your posts. I have upgraded to Leopard and doubled my RAM and just bought Logic Express in order to see whether PLAY is more stable with a different host. I have no experience with rewire, although that may be a solution until EASTWEST and/or MotU resolve whatever is causing the problem. ...

Try a test:

1. In the PLAY Settings, set your Engine Level to 2.

2. In the PLAY Settings, set your PLAY buffers to 512.

3. In DP, set your audio buffers to 512.

4. In DP, set VIs and all plugins to run in real time.

5. In DP, set your Work Priority to Medium-- and then try the test again with Work Priority set to High.

6. In DP, make sure Pre-fill buffers for quick start is turned OFF (ie: unchecked).

Does that work better?

If so, dial back these numbers to see where things begin to choke again. That will be your performance threshold based upon a given amount of samples you have loaded. Larger projects will require larger numbers. Smaller projects can benefit from smaller numbers.

One unfortunate reality DAW users must still deal with is some trade off between latency and stability.

If it's of any consolation, I have a late 2006 MacPro 3G Quad with 8GB RAM. In both 10.4.11 and 10.5.x I've gotten nearly all of FabFour loaded (40+ instances) and in another project pretty much all of the EWQLSO key switch patches loaded at once (20+ instances with a dozen or more patches in each). In both cases, it was clearly much more than I would want to run at one time-- especially a dozen drum kits and basses in FabFour (which doesn't make musical sense), but it was just a stress test. DP ran sluggishly and was practically unusable with all that data, but it didn't crash. I knew then that I could scale back my templates and still have a more than enough sounds to work with.

For EWQLSO Platinum Plus, I have recently purchased a second license and am running brass and percussion from my G5 2.5 Dual (8GB) in 10.4.11 and DP 5.13 and the winds/strings on my MacPro in 10.4.11 with DP 5.13 as well as with DP6.02 in 10.5.6.

Important note: I am running each section of the orchestra from a different hard drive. My MacPro has a 5-drive eSATA "brick" connected to a Sonnet PCIe eSATA host card.

I can't speak for the new machines with the 2.5Ghz firewire buss, but I've found that SATA and eSATA work much better than the older 33Mhz firewire busses, which simply do not handle the quantity of data or drives nearly as well.

[Armageddon]

The newest version of PLAY (1.23) runs fine on Tiger (which is how I'm using it). Unfortunately, I think the dropouts, which seems to happen a lot in DP 6, are due more to overloading the processor with pre-rendering than the OS. In my case, it's a tradeoff, because I can run more instances of PLAY on my dinky MacBook with pre-rendering on, but having more instances of PLAY (along with whatever other VIs you're running in your project) seems to overload the processing. There's a few workarounds: 1) turn of pre-render 2) make sure your hardware buffer is set as high as it will go, which will off-load a little of the processing to your interface and 3) try setting your project sample and bit-depth down to 44.1 kHz/16-bit during the composition phase, then, turn it back up to your preferred sample rate/bit-depth when it comes time to lay off the audio. Also, I've posted this elsewhere, but definitely try to avoid putting more than one instrument on any instance of PLAY, two might even be pushing it. If you need a lot of PLAY instruments, loading up multiple instances of PLAY (with convolution reverb off until you absolutely need it) is always better than trying to pack everything in one instance.

[zed]

I wish that all you fellows with the great advice (and I really do think that you make some useful points) would include a signature in your profile. It would be much more useful advice if you did.

If you need a lot of PLAY instruments, loading up multiple instances of PLAY (with convolution reverb off until you absolutely need it) is always better than trying to pack everything in one instance.

I don't know about the "always" part. On my G5 dual 2.5, this was absolutely not the case. Loading 2 or 3 instances of PLAY would disable DP much more quickly than loading several instruments in a single instance. But neither worked very efficiently. On my recently aquired MacPro, I have been using multiple instances because I do recall EastWest stating that using multiple instances was more efficient than loading multiple instruments into an instance. Different systems, though, can respond differently, it would seem.

Which brings us full circle...

Signatures please!

[maswot]

Hi Frodo

Thanks for the tip about reducing DP's buffer size, which so far seems to be helping, I think. Too early to tell, since DP is still crashing occasionally now, but I still need to test all the different elements one by one.

There are so many variables that have gone ballistic in my system since moving to Leopard that it is going to take me quite some time to get any clarity: after upgrading to Leopard I also downloaded the latest upgrades for a host of other VI, such as Synthogy Ivory, Kontakt2 and 3 and Kontakt Player, etc., which now are also having problems. I just tried to upgrade my Native Instruments Komplete bundle and now suddenly IT is showing that it is no longer authorized and won't allow me to authorize it. And to top it off, when I open a VI such as Ivory in DP I get a message saying that I need to allocate more memory in DP (which is something I didn't know you could do manually in OSX - besides, I have 15 gigs of RAM, so this is a bogus glitch). Ai caramba. The only thing missing from the mix is a hardware problem. I remember the days when owning a Mac meant a trouble-free life. But I will either find the problem or die trying. I'll let you know if I ever get there.

Thanks for your help.

- Marc

PS. Apologies for taking so long to answer but I was on vacation (I needed it!!

[Armageddon]

I don't know about the "always" part. On my G5 dual 2.5, this was absolutely not the case. Loading 2 or 3 instances of PLAY would disable DP much more quickly than loading several instruments in a single instance. But neither worked very efficiently. On my recently aquired MacPro, I have been using multiple instances because I do recall EastWest stating that using multiple instances was more efficient than loading multiple instruments into an instance. Different systems, though, can respond differently, it would seem.

Sorry, I had no idea you were running on a dual G5. Unfortunately, that could be your problem above anything else. I know it's relatively easy to say "upgrade your computer" and a hell of a lot harder to do it, but I'm just barely above minimum system requirements for PLAY on my MacBook 2 GHz Core 2 Duo, and all I'm running is MOR. In fact, if you go to the EastWest forums, they pretty much suggest running it on nothing slower than a quad-core Intel Mac tower with as much RAM as you can pack into it, though I don't think you have to go quite that far. It's just extremely intensive software, and playing it inside of DP (I actually have to play it with pre-render on, otherwise, there's no way I'd be able to use as many instances of PLAY as I do) magnifies this problem. You're definitely going to get better results with the MacBook Pro -- it may just be too much for the G5.

As for the dropouts, that happens a bit inside of DP, and only some of the time will you actually get the "dropped samples" warning screen. The rest of the time, notes just cut off or don't play, similar to what it would sound like if you were using up too many resources at the same time inside of a hardware synth workstation. I chalk it up to pre-rendering having to do its thing and catch up with the MIDI tracks. I usually have to play the piece through once or twice for everything to play without dropping out, and I have my hardware buffer jacked all the way up and my bit and sample rates turned down as low as possible until the bounce stage. That being said, the current project I'm working on has five instances of PLAY, two with two instruments loaded (lead and rhythm guitars) and one with convolution reverb on, a SampleTank, a Sonik Synth, an FM8 and a B4 II (and last night, I loaded an instance of Predator into it, just to see if I could), so DP and my computer is handling quite a bit. For now, I'm planning on biting the bullet til I get the composition finished and can start bouncing tracks. Ultimately, I'm hoping to install a bigger and faster (7200 rpm or better) hard drive, which I believe will help pre-rendering go a lot smoother.

[maswot]

In my case I am running DP 6.02 on a Mac Pro with 15 gigs of RAM and only using one or two PLAY tracks, tops.

However, in trying to find whether PLAY is or is not the culprit, I have been doing a methodical testing of all my VI plug-ins, and it turns out that Spectrasonics' new Omnisphere also causes DP6 to crash, as does Korg's Digital Legacy (Korg M1), and now apparently so does Kontakt Player2, which I just upgraded the other day.

So it's looking more and more like a series of problems between DP and all these third-party developers, which admittedly are all putting out products that are new for the Mac Intel.

In short, Mac Intel is no doubt going to ' get there' eventually, but it sure isn't 'there' yet.

I had scheduled a month to record an album and I have now spent that entire month trying to get DP to stop crashing.

In desperation I bought Logic Express and I'll see if it's more stable. If so, I'll get the full Logic version and stop using DP, which is a shame because I think MotU is a good company and I want to see them do well. I'm sure MotU and all these other third-party developers will figure out these problems on Mac Intel eventually, but in the meantime I'm voting with my feet ... I'll report back if the problem continues with Logic.

-- Marc

[towerproductions]

I have a dual G5 2.4 tiger 10.4.11 , 7 GB ram and have have been running Play 1.2.3 with all latest updates and Dp 6.02. Pre render off. I can get 2 or 3 instances of Play going with 12-15 instruments before the DP Processor starts flipping out . Separate esata drives for the Play libs That's with a high buffer setting . For input I lower the buffer setting and usually have to freeze some tracks and disable a Play instance temporarily. This is with SO, SD2 , Fab4 , RA, etc.
I have been getting some crackling from Choirs but need to test that more.
I just starting setting up my Mac pro 2.8 8 core with Leopard and 14 GB ram and installing software and libs, so I will be interested to see how Play and DP 6.02 work with more power qand ram.


Craig

[maswot]

After several weeks and several hundred dollars in upgrading software and hardware, I think I am finally coming to the conclusion that PLAY is not the problem.

Indeed, now the problem seems to occur with any VI that I call up in a file that already has at least three or four other VI, and it appears to be a question of memory. Now if I try to open up a new VI in an existing DP file a window will pop up saying there is not enough memory, or no memory block big enough, or that I need to allocate more resources to the host. This is particularly surprising since I doubled my memory to 15 Gb recently. I am currently running hardware tests on my Mac Pro to see if the problem is faulty memory chips.

In any case, I think this warrants a new thread, if and when the tests finish, so I thank everyone who answered me and I think I can safely say that the problem in my case is not with EastWest Play but with something involving DP and memory allocation on OSX.

Thanks to everyone who has pitched in, and to this board in general -- this is a lifesaving resource!

Marc

[Armageddon]

What are you running in the background? I usually try to shut everything down that I'm not using (including and especially my wireless) and I can load up a fairly large number of VIs inside of DP 6.02 simultaneously, including multiple instances of PLAY, on my dinky MacBook 2GHz with 2 GBs of DDR 2 RAM. Most of the stuff in DP 6, especially pre-render, is more hard drive intensive than RAM intensive. Unless you're loading up some monstrous VIs (well, PLAY is one, definitely), you shouldn't be getting memory warnings, especially not with your rig.

If you have Tech Tools Pro, you can do a complete hardware diagnostic of your machine, including your RAM. You can even just go into "About This Mac" and see if the RAM shows up in your system profile. It's possible that, like you said, the RAM is faulty, or possibly not even socketed properly. Failing that, you could run "Activity Monitor" from your Utilities while DP is loaded to see if something else is eating up your RAM.