Pitch automation causing repeated crashes... I think

[csansom]

I'm working on a large orchestral project which involves some long, slow glissandi in the strings. My strings are Spitfire's Sable Strings (very nice!) and I've found the best way to achieve my glisses is to record a single long note to audio, then draw the glissando in the pitch automation (or pitch curve) display. This sounds much, much better than using pitch bend, which Spitfire don't really support anyway (because it sounds, in their word, 'shonky' - and they're right).

This was all going along swimmingly, but I've suddenly hit a point where I just can't do it without crashing. I'm doing nothing different from before, but DP just doesn't like it and throws its toys out of the pram. I've pared it right down so that all my VIs are disabled and I'm soloing just the one audio track I'm dealing with, but still it crashes, usually when I play back what I've just drawn.

However, the reason I say 'I think' is that a little while ago it crashed at the same point when I wasn't doing anything to do with pitch automation. One of them hadn’t worked very well, so I was re-recording the long MIDI note to an audio track - all other tracks muted - and it crashed. It hasn't occurred to me until now that maybe I should make a note of exactly where the bars/beats/ticks counter is when it crashes. Might it be that there's some corruption in my file at that point? I really hope not!

Anyone else had an experience like this or can shed any light on it?

[csansom]

It looks as if my problem might have been putting all my eggs into one Kontakt basket, as it were. Or two, anyway...

I had one instance of Kontakt with 4 each of first violins, second violins and violas, and 3 cellos - making fifteen parts in all; and another with a bunch of solo strings and 3 lots of section basses, adding up to 16. I've now separated them out into separate Kontakt instances for the firsts, seconds, violas, cellos and basses, with another for all the solo strings (which use far less resources), and I seem to be able to proceed fairly safely. At any rate it hasn’t crashed since I did that.

It means I can enable or disable a section at a time, which DP does seem to be happier with. It certainly looks as if this project - the largest I've tackled by some margin - is stretching my Mac to its limits!

[Dan Worley]

From what I've read on here lately from Magic Dave, you're doing the right thing spreading out the Kontakt instances like that. That spreads the load to the multiple cores.

[csansom]

Ah - right. That seems logical. Thanks for the reassurance!

[dpg4macman]

Not sure if this will help but I would by pass all plugins - then try the pitch edit. Do you have plugin automation going on at that point? I'm stumped. Hope this helps anyway.

mvh

[csansom]

No, there's no plug-in automation going on at these points. I've come to the conclusion that I'm simply stretching my Mac to its limits. Sable Strings are pretty resource-hungry (by my standards, anyway - I'm used to Garritan Personal Orchestra!).

I've now found a routine that works pretty well. For each place I need a glissando, I do the following:
1 Make sure all VIs other than the one I need are disabled.
2 Record a note for the gliss (or the passage containing it) to an audio track.
3 Draw in my pitch automation and check it's worked.
4 Immediately freeze that to a fresh bit of audio.
5 Delete the audio with the automation and replace it with the frozen audio.
...and saving like mad all the time! Still the occasional crash, but they're pretty rare, and because when they do happen I usually only have one VI active, the relaunch doesn’t take too long.

Of course this wouldn’t work if I wasn't confident of not wanting to change any of these glissandi later, but in this case I'm working from a score that's 'set in stone' - I'm producing a dummy performance rather than creating a new piece. And in any case if I do need to redo any of them it's not that much extra work.

Thanks for the thoughts, guys!

[dpg4macman]

Another thought, Change your Hardware Buffer Size to 512 or 1024.

mvh

[Dan Worley]

One of the things I've found that helps me get the most out of my poor old mac when working in DP, is to turn off as much background processing (Beat Analysis) as possible, if your work allows for it.

This makes quite a noticeable difference in how DP reacts and performs.

[csansom]

Interesting -thanks for this. In fact I find my settings are pretty close to this anyway. The only differences are:

* I have 'Play the old, uncompressed soundbites' selected instead of 'Mute soundbites under construction'
* Your third pair of options aren’t there in my prefs - and yet I see that like me you're using DP8. Is this a change between 8.0 and 8.02, I wonder? Or maybe it's to do with other hardware settings. (Aha - I see here's an 8.03 update. No doubt that'll solve all my problems... as if...)

Anyway, I've found a decent way of working almost entirely crash-free now (see above plus a couple of other precautions). That said, I've hit a different snag with pitch automation, on which I'll start a new thread...

[csansom]

...and hot on the heels of 8.03 we have 8.04, and I actually got an email from MOTU thanking me for sending my crash reports, and saying they've been tracking it closely and have issued a fix for it in 8.04.

Slightly unfortunate timing as far as I'm concerned because I've now finished doing all that glissing (though there may be the odd one to redo as I come across them in mixing), but of course I'll have to test it anyway. We shall see...