Performance Bar Overload in DP 8.01

[Gravity Jim]

Just encountered my first real problem working in DP 8.01.

I'm composing in a template with six instances of Kontakt 5... not a huge amount of data, but two of those instances are Session Strings Pro, and in one of them I am using the Animator feature of that VI.

It was working fine, until it wasn't: suddenly the Performance Meter was spiking constantly, accompanied by distortion and artifacts in the audio, so I decided to freeze a couple of tracks I was pretty sure of. I muted everything but the MIDI and Instrument tracks for the instance of Kontakt/SSP with the Animator cooking, and when I tried to freeze, the meter redlined and stayed there. A dialog box suggested I try increasing the buffer.

So I did, and then the performance meter went berserk... solid red, and the program was obviously so busy that even pulling down a menu was incredibly slow.

I haven't seen any behavior like this. Any guesses? (BTW, how does one turn PunchGuard OFF? I am only seeing two opertional options in the Preferences menu, but no actual "Off" switch. I know I'm just looking in the wrong place...)

[tommymandel]

Are you running it in 32- or 64-bit mode, Jim? I notice (same 3,1 Tower as yours I believe) that since DP8, 32 bit runs the Audio Performance meter way higher than in DP7.24; I guess Motu would like us to run 64 bit. If that's not it, apologies, I'm not that fluent in Kontakt; although, as you no doubt know, DP is happier with 6 instances of Kontakt, each running on its own track, and less happy with one instance of Kontakt with 6 instruments loaded in. (i think )

[Gravity Jim]

You are correct about instances of Kontakt, Tommy, and I've always run it that way because... well, that's just the way I always did it.

And I am running in 64 bit mode. Or was last time I checked! Maybe I better make sure I still am.

The problem disappeared after quitting everything and restarting the sequence. Once open, the meter hovered around 20-25%, as it was before, and so I went ahead and froze the tracks in question. Running fine now, but I'd love to know how to prevent this in the future. This sequence doesn't seem to represent anything more complicated than I usually run (I don't mix huge templates... my composing has become more and more stripped down as the years have gone by).

[Dan Worley]

(BTW, how does one turn PunchGuard OFF? I am only seeing two opertional options in the Preferences menu, but no actual "Off" switch. I know I'm just looking in the wrong place...)

As far as I know, you can't turn it off. DP will keep recording until you hit the Stop button, not matter how you have PunchGuard set. Even if you do a manual or auto punch-out, if DP isn't stopped, it keeps recording on and on and on and on. Its crazy! I only just realized this about three weeks ago! What a putz. All those times when I punched out too early could have been saved. Well, now I know.

I used to set up an auto-punch and go up to the house while DP was recording long real-time bounces. I would hit stop after I got back. I didn't know DP was recording the entire time after the punch-out! Now I make sure to also setup an auto-stop when I do any real-time bounces.

[Shooshie]

Just encountered my first real problem working in DP 8.01.

I'm composing in a template with six instances of Kontakt 5... not a huge amount of data, but two of those instances are Session Strings Pro, and in one of them I am using the Animator feature of that VI.

It was working fine, until it wasn't: suddenly the Performance Meter was spiking constantly, accompanied by distortion and artifacts in the audio, so I decided to freeze a couple of tracks I was pretty sure of. I muted everything but the MIDI and Instrument tracks for the instance of Kontakt/SSP with the Animator cooking, and when I tried to freeze, the meter redlined and stayed there. A dialog box suggested I try increasing the buffer.

So I did, and then the performance meter went berserk... solid red, and the program was obviously so busy that even pulling down a menu was incredibly slow.

This sounds like the problems I was having with Kontakt before I quit using it. In my case, there would also be crazy noises that would happen, semi-randomly. They'd always happen within a certain range, but never at exactly the same place. The fix I found at the time was to go in and reconfigure the instruments. In other words, set up the instruments just as they were, but from scratch, rather than trying to reset the existing instances. I don't know if that will help you, but that's what used to fix it for me. That was several years ago. Probably 2007 or so. I continued to use Kontakt lightly for some time after that, but gradually worked it out of my setups entirely.

Sorry to hear you're having troubles. That's a terrible feeling!

Shooshie

[Tobor]

I really like Session Strings Pro, but as you've noticed it's a huge memory hog- some of those presets are very large and I've run into problems if I try to do too much else after loading a large preset (like changing presets etc.). It's frozen DP on occasion.

Sometimes I'm tempted to just load in Session Strings instead.

[Aramis]

I got something similar !!!!!!!

I am trying to narrow it down .


Restarting the project is solving it but !!!!!!!!!

I want to understand more !!!!!

Just encountered my first real problem working in DP 8.01.

I'm composing in a template with six instances of Kontakt 5... not a huge amount of data, but two of those instances are Session Strings Pro, and in one of them I am using the Animator feature of that VI.

It was working fine, until it wasn't: suddenly the Performance Meter was spiking constantly, accompanied by distortion and artifacts in the audio, so I decided to freeze a couple of tracks I was pretty sure of. I muted everything but the MIDI and Instrument tracks for the instance of Kontakt/SSP with the Animator cooking, and when I tried to freeze, the meter redlined and stayed there. A dialog box suggested I try increasing the buffer.

So I did, and then the performance meter went berserk... solid red, and the program was obviously so busy that even pulling down a menu was incredibly slow.

I haven't seen any behavior like this. Any guesses? (BTW, how does one turn PunchGuard OFF? I am only seeing two opertional options in the Preferences menu, but no actual "Off" switch. I know I'm just looking in the wrong place...)

[Gravity Jim]

Shooshie, I use lot of Kontakt all the time and haven't had any trouble before now... I don't think it's a "general Kontakt" kinda thing. I'm still curious about what you mean by "resetting from scratch." I don't know exactly what you're saying, but I'd like to for future reference.

Tobor, your post is very helpful. After posting this I restarted DP, and it came up just fine.... I froze the SSP tracks and disabled the originals. Worked perfect, just like always the rest of the day.

Do you suppose that SSP allows data to somehow "build up" in RAM? It worked fine, but seemed to have something to do with how long you had been using the instrument, or perhaps how many times to payed the track..... (yeah, I know that sounds stupid, but it's an intuitive, not informed, guess.)

[Tobor]

Jim, you're on to something in your last paragraph. I always approach working with SSP as if it's eventually going to freeze (saving often), but everything comes back up upon a reboot.

[Shooshie]

Shooshie, I use lot of Kontakt all the time and haven't had any trouble before now... I don't think it's a "general Kontakt" kinda thing. I'm still curious about what you mean by "resetting from scratch." I don't know exactly what you're saying, but I'd like to for future reference.

Something had gotten corrupted in the instance of Kontakt. It required deleting the instance and adding a new instance of the same VI, configured the same way with the same instrument(s) and settings. Going back to an older saved file and copying the pre-corruption instance did not work. I had to rebuild it from scratch. Then the problem went away.

These problems included a number of bizarre symptoms. To name a few:
1) certain notes would not play. I spent hours trying to find the problem in the track(s), but there were no abnormalities. The same notes would play a few bars later.
2) screeching digital noise would happen unexpectedly at a certain spot. Again, nothing in the track was abnormal. This would be accompanied by overload in the DP performance meter.
3) inappropriate response to continuous controllers
(these problems did not happen together. The corruption produced one of the above, or others.)

Those are just a few things that I remember. There were others. The old tried-&-true methods of dealing with corruption didn't really work. What worked was throwing out and rebuilding my instances of Kontakt. This was back during Kontakt 3 and 4. K4 was the last version I used extensively.

Shooshie

[Dan Worley]

1) certain notes would not play. I spent hours trying to find the problem in the track(s), but there were no abnormalities. The same notes would play a few bars later.

Well, hey, you finally got MIDI note muting. You just weren't able to select which notes to apply it to. I guess that's an important part of it.

[Aramis]

Shooshie, I use lot of Kontakt all the time and haven't had any trouble before now... I don't think it's a "general Kontakt" kinda thing. I'm still curious about what you mean by "resetting from scratch." I don't know exactly what you're saying, but I'd like to for future reference.

Something had gotten corrupted in the instance of Kontakt. It required deleting the instance and adding a new instance of the same VI, configured the same way with the same instrument(s) and settings. Going back to an older saved file and copying the pre-corruption instance did not work. I had to rebuild it from scratch. Then the problem went away.

These problems included a number of bizarre symptoms. To name a few:
1) certain notes would not play. I spent hours trying to find the problem in the track(s), but there were no abnormalities. The same notes would play a few bars later.
2) screeching digital noise would happen unexpectedly at a certain spot. Again, nothing in the track was abnormal. This would be accompanied by overload in the DP performance meter.
3) inappropriate response to continuous controllers
(these problems did not happen together. The corruption produced one of the above, or others.)

Those are just a few things that I remember. There were others. The old tried-&-true methods of dealing with corruption didn't really work. What worked was throwing out and rebuilding my instances of Kontakt. This was back during Kontakt 3 and 4. K4 was the last version I used extensively.

Shooshie

Hey Shooshie,
I got the Performance bar overload and I suppose it is hard to find which track does it ?

Aramis

[labman]

1) certain notes would not play. I spent hours trying to find the problem in the track(s), but there were no abnormalities. The same notes would play a few bars later.

Well, hey, you finally got MIDI note muting. You just weren't able to select which notes to apply it to.