The Digital Performer Tips Sheet

[sergiococchi]

Thanx Zed!

Very helpful!

SirJo

[daveswallace]

please add a note about debugging via the console to the optimization section! An old MIDI driver was forcing my audio/MIDI server to restart in 32 bit mode, causing all sorts of issues with DP, including horrible performance. It even crashed all my convolution reverbs.

I ran through all the optimization, and it helped a little, but this was the main culprit.

[bolla]

If you are bored with the Motu themes.....
Control/Option/Command/8
will reverse the spectrum of your monitor.

Cheers, Bolla

[daniel.sneed]

If you are bored with the Motu themes.....
Control/Option/Command/8
will reverse the spectrum of your monitor.Cheers, Bolla

I always do while on stage. It takes light significantly lower.

[toodamnhip]

please add a note about debugging via the console to the optimization section! An old MIDI driver was forcing my audio/MIDI server to restart in 32 bit mode, causing all sorts of issues with DP, including horrible performance. It even crashed all my convolution reverbs.

I ran through all the optimization, and it helped a little, but this was the main culprit.

How do you "de bug"via the console please?

[Shooshie]

I have to boot Audio-MIDI Setup in 32bit mode, or it won't work. Suddenly there will be no connection from external MIDI to DP or anything else. So, I go to the app itself, get info, then select "always boot in 32 bit mode" on the Info window. Log out, and log-in again. Then things finally work fine.

[edit]In 2014, needless to say, this is no longer the case. With 54 bit Macintosh computers, most of the apps and control panels work in 64 bits. [/edit]

[zed]

I have to boot Audio-MIDI Setup in 32bit mode, or it won't work. Suddenly there will be no connection from external MIDI to DP or anything else. So, I go to the app itself, get info, then select "always boot in 32 bit mode" on the Info window. Log out, and log-in again. Then things finally work fine.

Since Snow Leopard, this started happening to me intermittently (booting in 32bit mode) about once a month. I will get my computer started load my DP project and sit down to work, and discover that there is no MIDI being transmitted from external controllers, even though the project will play previously recorded MIDI. The only solution is to reboot the computer.

Connected to the same issue? Probably.

[Shooshie]

I have been working on the Tips Sheet thread. If you've grown frustrated with it because of links that do not work and pictures that do not appear, I've at least updated it to where it should have been when James updated the forum a couple of years ago, and changed the name from Unicornation to MotuNation. I think all the links work now, and it's a little more up to date, though there is a long way to go. I still have a backlog of dozens of tips that need to be added, even though I went ahead and added some that were posted just a few days ago.

I do not often get time to work on this, so thanks for being patient. I figure I'll get it all up to date, then DP8 will come out and look entirely different, and I'll have to start again!

Shooshie

[zed]

....it's a little more up to date, though there is a long way to go. I still have a backlog of dozens of tips that need to be added, even though I went ahead and added some that were posted just a few days ago.

I do not often get time to work on this, so thanks for being patient. I figure I'll get it all up to date, then DP8 will come out and look entirely different, and I'll have to start again!

It's very good of you to have taken this on. Do appreciate your efforts.

[Kubi]

Digital Performer is a full-featured Digital Audio Workstation/Sequencer software package published by Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Apple Macintosh platform.

Ha! We're still a long ways away from needing dogs to tell apart the Terminators from the real humans...

[Shooshie]

From another thread, but one which I think would weather well in this one.

Digital Performer has its roots at Berklee College of Music:

We were using computers in the curriculum back in late 1982, with the Apple II, so when the Macintosh came out, we were probably one of the first music schools to jump on the bandwagon and see its value. One of my students was involved with writing the first sequencer program for the Macintosh– his name was Roy Groth and he worked at Mark of the Unicorn [www.motu.com] developing a program called Performer, which is now called Digital Performer.

Groth was an employee of MOTU from 1984 through 1989, being the force behind the creation of the original Performer, from version 1.0 through version 2.3. The Performer you see in this flier was apparently Roy's work.


He seems to have left MOTU at the time when Performer began to go through some major changes. It was not long after he left that we had a Graphic Editing Window for MIDI, which gave us our first taste of the now familiar "piano roll" editor.

• [Incidentally, piano rolls were not actually the "performance" of the artist who played the piano. A piano which could punch holes in paper would seriously affect the pianist's technique. Instead, the piano left faint marks on the roll in something like a pencil, then the REAL creator of those rolls came in and made the punches. He would base their sustain and loudness on his own familiarity with the artist, meaning that every piano roll you've ever heard as "authentic" was actually the interpretation of the technician who made the roll. Only a few people really knew about this, or were familiar with the punching/editing machines they used. It was very possibly these editors which inspired the piano roll editor for MIDI sequencers.]

For reasons known only to himself, I suppose, Roy Groth now goes by a different name, but here is his résumé on Linked-In:
Roy Groth/Procops The interesting part for our purposes is near the bottom, back toward the beginning of his professional programming experience. But it also gets interesting after he leaves MOTU, for he goes to work for AVID, and eventually designed the MIDI component of ProTools, then modifying it for OSX. This link takes you to a PDF of an article about a product at AVID for which Groth was the programming lead. (Groth is in the middle of the first picture) It's kind of interesting in its own light, though it has little to do with what we do. It's a multi-media tool for compiling and composing news for publishing or broadcasting.

This page includes a story about an original beta tester for Performer. Down the page a ways, he says:

Around the same time, I was also involved with some computer geniuses from M.I.T. and they had made me a beta tester for the first music sequencer on a Macintosh. The lyric premise was a work of musical science fiction and fantasy. Nothing like that was going on at the time. 'Planet Texas' was a milestone both musically and technologically. I would work on the song until the program crashed and then Roy Groth, the inventor of the 'Performer' software, would send me the fix over a 300-baud modem. The whole thing was done on a 512k Fat Mac with the use of only floppy disks. It was very exciting on so many levels.

Groth went on to bigger jobs and larger paychecks when Digital Performer was just getting started, leaving us with a huge blank space from 1989 through 2001, during which we know very little about who worked on DP. At least, *I* know very little. Maybe someone else can fill in some history. I knew about people in the other departments, for I talked to them periodically, or communicated by mail. Those included people like Danny Rose, Jim Cooper, and Les Quindepan, who as far as I know are still with MOTU.

In the late-1990's, another name joins the team, and every one of us is familiar with his work. Matthew Davidson began designing GUI interfaces for MOTU, first designing the "new" plugin interfaces for the Masterworks Limiter and Compressor (1998), and then doing the same for DP's entire range of plugins, released in version 2.7 (1999). Over the next year (2000) he designed the GUI for DP 3.0, released in January of 2001 if memory serves. Davidson designed many other interfaces for MOTU, including CueMix, Masterworks EQ, the bundled VI's, MX4, and ultimately, DP 6. He was also responsible for most of the packaging for MOTU's products.

Davidson, by the way, has been a somewhat active participant at MOTUNation. I'll leave you to guess his forum identity. [2014: the link above does not work, but the 404 error page is from his server. You can still guess his forum ID] It's just nice to keep that in mind when venting loudly and rudely proclaiming about the "unusable interface" or those "terrible VIs" produced by that faceless company that goes by the name of "MOTU." Personally, I can't believe the resistance proclaimed by some members of this forum in regard to MOTU's updating to the latest versions of DP. Every day there is some variant of "does DP7 work?" Of COURSE it works, for goodness sake! And the bundled synths are ingenious, to say the least.

I've known about Matthew for a long time but haven't had any particular reason to mention his website or to single him out. But when I discovered the story about Roy Groth, it seemed like nice "bookends" to the DP story if I included someone involved in recent development, too. So, what caused me to look up Roy Groth? I was trying out "File Juicer" on some old Performer documents, just to see if by some chance they might yield a standard MIDI file (of course they didn't). Instead, I got a single text file that said nothing but "Roy Groth, Performer" at the top. Every one of them said that, so I decided to look him up. Didn't take long to figure out why his name was hidden in the Performer files.

I thought you might enjoy learning what I found. It's nice to put names and faces with the development of things we use.

Shooshie

[zed]

I really enjoyed learning a little more about the making of piano rolls. That is some very interesting information, indeed.

I can guess who Matthew is, just based on a certain someone who is particularly knowledgeable. The link provided for him is not working at the moment, so perhaps he did not want to be identified.

I would have been with Digital Performer since 1991 if I hadn't made the decision to go Opcode instead of MOTU. I don't remember for sure what the reason was why I picked the one over the other, but it may very well be that "Opcode" sounded more professional than "Mark of the Unicorn". But I'm not sure that was the reason.

In retrospect, my life would have been easier if I had become a DP expert in the early '90s and stuck with it all these years. I am still suffering the pangs of songs stuck on old computers in both StudioVisionPro and ProTools. Wish I'd had a looking glass into the future 21 years ago.

[Buckage]

I don't think this was covered anywhere else on Motunation but wanted to share a pattern click tip. If you are working in 7/8 and want to have a 2,2,3 click (quarter, quarter, dotted quarter) try typing in 2 2 3 in the the pattern click window and do not include the /8 at the end. For some reason when the /8 is added it sees the 3 as a triplet count.

I got it to work on my rig and a friend's system. Hopefully it works for anyone needing that.

[sonicflight]

Shooshie....

If you've got a current document that you're working on with consolidating all this great work into a clean, simple document, if you pass it to me on where you're at I'd give a try to continue working through it. It would be great to have a clean, printable document that identifies all these great tips without all the external references, thread details, etc...

Let me know or pass me the DOC.

Thanks!

[Prime Mover]

I'm going to add this to the Tips sheet:

When Take Comping, often you don't need all related tracks to be visible (for instance, all the drum tracks or stereo pairs). Simply hiding these tracks and their take explosions from the sequence editor doesn't work though, tracks that are not selected in the SE can not have operations performed to them, even if they are grouped with other selected tracks. However, there is an easy workaround. Put all your unneeded tracks into a track folder and collapse it. As long as the track folder is selected in the SE window, even if it's collapsed, it's tracks are active for editing.

This is great for comping large drum setups, where most of the time, seeing the kick, snare, and overheads are a good enough reference to comp with. Heck, probably you could ditch the snare as well, since it appears fairly clearly in the OH track(s). So get rid of those pesky auxiliary tracks like bottom snare, toms, HH, room mics, etc, and give yourself a lot more screen room to work with.

Another obvious place to do this is with stereo pairs, or multiple mics on one instrument. I typically mic upright bass with three mics, that's two more tracks than I need for take comping purposes. Less tracks means you can see more takes at once, and larger, so you can make quicker decisions.

One thing to note, however, is that the global operations of showing/hiding takes MUST be done while the track folders are UN-collapsed. It appears that these full-track operations can only be performed on immediately visible tracks. Just make sure to uncollapse that folder before and after you do your comping.