After trying everything, 7.1 is still a nightmare (for me)

[rsaltmarsh]

Ok so I made the leap from a relatively stable 5.13 that I used for the past couple years straight into 7.02 and was incredibly happy!! Took me a little while to find where they had moved some things, but over all I was thrilled with the new look, features, and performance AND stability. Two months later, I upgrade to 7.1... What a nightmare, random crashes, especially when using VI's and MIDI. It also seemed to run slower than 7.02. I read through all the posts, trashed ALL my prefs, downloaded and installed all the new MOTU drivers, etc, etc, even created a new user account to see if that would make a difference... nothing.. bottom line.. went back to 7.02... has been rock solid. The CD burn is still freaky so I don't trust it. Unfortunately, that was one of the new features I really looked forward too. And yes I did all the suggestions, including extending the selection past the wave file... still is a hit and miss proposition. Maybe one of these days they will get it bug free. To bad it doesn't save the bounce file to disk so it can be analyzed and not have to re-bounce every time.

My only purpose in posting is to find brothers(sisters too) in arms who may be experiencing the same dilemma and that some one from MOTU might be listening. I'm running and older machine(G5 Duo) with a UAD-1 card and firewire via a Tascam DM3200 and that may contribute, but why a rock solid 7.02 and not a 7.1? I'll leave that for the guys in the cubicles to figure out. Hoping that 7.11 is a gift from heaven.

[James Steele]

Sorry to hear you're having issues. I edited your subject header because the "nightmare" scenario you describe isn't exactly universal. You've probably seen the posts about how you should let DP 7.1 completely rebuild waveforms when loading projects created in earlier versions. Wish I had better suggestions for you and sorry to hear of your misfortune.

[David Polich]

I agree with James - I'm on a PPC Dual 2.3Ghz running Tiger and DP 7.1 and so far, so good. No real problems, other than Stillwell plug-in GUI's are a no-show.

Of course, I could start having problems tomorrow -

[rsaltmarsh]

James... you are, of course, exactly right. I have read many who are thrilled and working in 7.1 with little to no problems. Hopefully I will be one of them soon. I appreciated your suggestion and in the couple projects I did load from an older session it did rebuild the wave forms displays and such, but most of my problems were in new files created in 7.1. When time permits and clients aren't huffing steam because of crashes, I'll dive back in and try and trouble shoot and find what the issues are, at least untill the next DP release come around. Till then, thanks for the forum and all your efforts Much appreciated!

Ron

[James Steele]

James... you are, of course, exactly right. I have read many who are thrilled and working in 7.1 with little to no problems. Hopefully I will be one of them soon. I appreciated your suggestion and in the couple projects I did load from an older session it did rebuild the wave forms displays and such, but most of my problems were in new files created in 7.1. When time permits and clients aren't huffing steam because of crashes, I'll dive back in and try and trouble shoot and find what the issues are, at least untill the next DP release come around. Till then, thanks for the forum and all your efforts Much appreciated!

Ron

I'm sorry again you're having problems. I don't doubt that they are real. These things can be so hard to track down and pinpoint. You may have some sort of conflict with an older third party plug-in. I'd make sure they're up to date. I know someone who had issues with an older version of Autotune, but then DP wouldn't even get past the startup screen for him. You might checking to see if you have any crash logs from DP 7.1 and submit them to MOTU with a trouble ticket or post it here. Someone might be able to spot something that would give us some clues as to what's going on.

[Tobor]

James... you are, of course, exactly right. I have read many who are thrilled and working in 7.1 with little to no problems. Hopefully I will be one of them soon. I appreciated your suggestion and in the couple projects I did load from an older session it did rebuild the wave forms displays and such, but most of my problems were in new files created in 7.1. When time permits and clients aren't huffing steam because of crashes, I'll dive back in and try and trouble shoot and find what the issues are, at least untill the next DP release come around. Till then, thanks for the forum and all your efforts Much appreciated!

Ron

I'm sorry again you're having problems. I don't doubt that they are real. These things can be so hard to track down and pinpoint. You may have some sort of conflict with an older third party plug-in. I'd make sure they're up to date. I know someone who had issues with an older version of Autotune, but then DP wouldn't even get past the startup screen for him. You might checking to see if you have any crash logs from DP 7.1 and submit them to MOTU with a trouble ticket or post it here. Someone might be able to spot something that would give us some clues as to what's going on.

Without dredging up a lengthy previous thread, wanted to post an update to the issue I was having. I was thinking that some interaction with Drumcore was causing repeatable crashes on rewind, while working fine in other respects, stopping, starting, etc.

Well, today I just had a crash on rewind....with Stylus, as well as Kontakt and an Ivory freeze track. No Drumcores loaded. I had left DP for another program for a few minutes and returned to it.

I wonder if it has something to do with my FW drives falling asleep if they don't have anything playing for awhile, and DP quits if the drives aren't ready. Note: pure conjecture. I sent the logs to MOTU.

I am enjoying working in 7.1 outside of this issue so hope I can resolve it sometime soon.

Tobor

[tommymandel]

Just to chime in by way of encouragement,
I'm getting good behavior with DP7.1 and (regular 10.5.8 ) Leopard on my PPC 2.3DC.
I just invested in that machine's future by upping the RAM to 7GB, and adding a PCI-e eSATA card and an external enclosure with a 1TB drive, and 2 used 24io's. The Disk read performance bar doesn't budge from near 0% with 21 stereo tracks playing. the CPU is happy too.
That's without a lot of VI's. I'm just working up to complete chaos gradually,

PS: David, I thought that Stillwell had released an update fixing that graphic bug. I never downloaded it (I use Event Horizon and 1973eq) so I still use my mouse's scroll wheel, which works (better on the knobs than the sliders.)

[David Polich]

Just to chime in by way of encouragement,
I'm getting good behavior with DP7.1 and (regular 10.5.8 ) Leopard on my PPC 2.3DC.
I just invested in that machine's future by upping the RAM to 7GB, and adding a PCI-e eSATA card and an external enclosure with a 1TB drive, and 2 used 24io's. The Disk read performance bar doesn't budge from near 0% with 21 stereo tracks playing. the CPU is happy too.
That's without a lot of VI's. I'm just working up to complete chaos gradually,

PS: David, I thought that Stillwell had released an update fixing that graphic bug. I never downloaded it (I use Event Horizon and 1973eq) so I still use my mouse's scroll wheel, which works (better on the knobs than the sliders.)

Hmmm- I'm going over to Stillweel site right now to check it out -

[David Polich]

Okay, I'm back from visiting the Stillwell site - the last update for anything Stillwell was Sept. 29, when Scott posted beta versions of plug-ins that are supposed to run in Snow Leopard. Nothing posted about GUI problems with DP 7.1 being addressed.

I think Scott would post news about solving this here on this forum...

[zed]

For me, 7.1 doesn't seem more or less stable than 7.02, since I have never had any real stability since I got my Intel Mac a year ago. I have crashed at least 10 times today, and a few of those were when I was not even working in DP, I would be doing something in another program, with DP idle, and then DP would disappear with an error message telling me that it had quit unnexpectedly. I assume that those particular crashes are related to autosave.

I hope they can rework the autosave code so that it does NOT autosave when you haven't made any changes to the file. If autosave is set for every 2 minutes, and you leave for lunch or to work on something else for an hour, DP shouldn't be continuing to resave every 2 minutes... especially if it may result in an unnexpected error.

[David Polich]

For me, 7.1 doesn't seem more or less stable than 7.02, since I have never had any real stability since I got my Intel Mac a year ago. I have crashed at least 10 times today, and a few of those were when I was not even working in DP, I would be doing something in another program, with DP idle, and then DP would disappear with an error message telling me that it had quit unnexpectedly. I assume that those particular crashes are related to autosave.

I hope they can rework the autosave code so that it does NOT autosave when you haven't made any changes to the file. If autosave is set for every 2 minutes, and you leave for lunch or to work on something else for an hour, DP shouldn't be continuing to resave every 2 minutes... especially if it may result in an unnexpected error.

You can disable Auto-Save, and also specify how you want it to behave if you have it enabled. I would think that "Auto-Save" would...ummm...."auto" save, that's kind of the point of it....so you don't have to think about it.
You can easily set Auto-Save to save at intervals greater than 2 minutes, that's for sure.

Crashing ten times a day on an Intel Mac - that isn't right, nor is it
the kind of behavior most people experience. There must be some gremlins in
your system...I don't believe it is DP's fault.

[KEVORKIAN]

Okay, I'm back from visiting the Stillwell site - the last update for anything Stillwell was Sept. 29, when Scott posted beta versions of plug-ins that are supposed to run in Snow Leopard. Nothing posted about GUI problems with DP 7.1 being addressed.

I think Scott would post news about solving this here on this forum...

http://downloads.stillwellaudio.com/stillwell/beta/

Last update was actually January 20th... for some reason Scott is not updating the front of the site anymore when he posts new betas... you have to hunt the forums for them.

[zed]

You can disable Auto-Save, and also specify how you want it to behave if you have it enabled. I would think that "Auto-Save" would...ummm...."auto" save, that's kind of the point of it....so you don't have to think about it.

You don't want to think about it, for sure. But it shouldn't be complicated for the program to temporarily disable auto-saving all by itself if nothing has changed in the document.

You can easily set Auto-Save to save at intervals greater than 2 minutes, that's for sure.

When you crash as much as I do, 2 minutes can be a blessing. I tried it at 15 minute intervals and then lost 13 minutes of work, because I'd neglected to manually save. So I switched it back to 2 minutes.

One thing I discovered, however, is that we must be VERY CAREFUL about using an auto-saved file if DP crashed while doing the auto-save. Yesterday I crashed and hadn't manually saved the project in a while, so I decided to use the auto-saved version of the file. It loaded without any apparent problems, but I discovered to my dismay that instruments had not loaded in the VIs (i.e. the VIs were empty).

There must be some gremlins in
your system...I don't believe it is DP's fault.

You are very right, my friend. I have gremlins in my system for sure, and I have thrown many hours trying to resolve my issues, but to no avail. It gets me very frustrated and upset at times, and good songs don't get finished. Probably my next step should be to buy or rent a new audio interface and see if that helps. I'll get it sorted out eventually I do hope.

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

James... you are, of course, exactly right. I have read many who are thrilled and working in 7.1 with little to no problems. Hopefully I will be one of them soon. I appreciated your suggestion and in the couple projects I did load from an older session it did rebuild the wave forms displays and such, but most of my problems were in new files created in 7.1. When time permits and clients aren't huffing steam because of crashes, I'll dive back in and try and trouble shoot and find what the issues are, at least untill the next DP release come around. Till then, thanks for the forum and all your efforts Much appreciated!

Ron

I'm sorry again you're having problems. I don't doubt that they are real. These things can be so hard to track down and pinpoint. You may have some sort of conflict with an older third party plug-in. I'd make sure they're up to date. I know someone who had issues with an older version of Autotune, but then DP wouldn't even get past the startup screen for him. You might checking to see if you have any crash logs from DP 7.1 and submit them to MOTU with a trouble ticket or post it here. Someone might be able to spot something that would give us some clues as to what's going on.

Without dredging up a lengthy previous thread, wanted to post an update to the issue I was having. I was thinking that some interaction with Drumcore was causing repeatable crashes on rewind, while working fine in other respects, stopping, starting, etc.

Well, today I just had a crash on rewind....with Stylus, as well as Kontakt and an Ivory freeze track. No Drumcores loaded. I had left DP for another program for a few minutes and returned to it.

I wonder if it has something to do with my FW drives falling asleep if they don't have anything playing for awhile, and DP quits if the drives aren't ready. Note: pure conjecture. I sent the logs to MOTU.

I am enjoying working in 7.1 outside of this issue so hope I can resolve it sometime soon.

Tobor

When you have your crash on rewind, is DP playing when you hit rewind? Hitting stop first may help.

I went through that for a while with version 6 and just got in the hobbit (pun intended) of hitting stop before rewind. Eventually it went away, I don't remember exactly what I did to fix it. (Maybe I don't hit rewind on the fly anymore)

You may try to experiment with your configure studio settings for prefill file buffer and also try changing your audio plug in settings in the preference menu to/from pre-gen to real time or visa versa.

I think there is either a setting in MacOS for disabling hard drive spin down, or certainly there should be a disk utility that will allow you to disable it.

I never let my disks spin down. Cruel? Possibly, but these drives knew the job was dangerous when they took it. They can sleep at night when I do (actually I just turn everything off) or when I replace them with SSD drives (or whatever will be next)

If I remember right, I think that hitting stop before you hit play will sometimes wake up sleeping drives before they have to go from 0-7200rpm instantly

[tommymandel]

PS: I thought that Stillwell had released an update fixing that graphic bug. I never downloaded it (I use Event Horizon and 1973eq) so I still use my mouse's scroll wheel, which works (better on the knobs than the sliders.)

I just downloaded their newest beta Event Horizon and 1973eq. Good and bad news.
Good: The mouse now correctly controls the knobs and sliders.
Not so Good: just like on the Jupiter8-v2 plug-in, when its window is frontmost, these plug-ins disable DP's most basic transport key commands: (Spacebar to toggle play/stop, and Enter to play) do not function - other than to trigger a system alert beep.

Clicking outside of the plug-in window, for example anywhere in the Tracks Overview Window, restores the spacebar's and enter key's functionalities.