MachFive status: working well in DP 8?

[jloeb]

I'm considering finally upgrading from (old, old)) MachFive v2 to v3 which has generally been very well reviewed and packs a ton of fantastic features BUT:

What's your opinion on how it's working these days? Smoothly? Glitchily? Any recurrent problems? Any problems running alongside Kontakt 4/5 in the same session?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Awesome here.

[Killahurts]

It's awesome, you won't regret getting it!

I had some problems recently with DP 8.06 and M53, but it was only one of several larger problems I experienced with 8.06. Went back to 8.05 and all is well again.

[bayswater]

I've had a project going for the last two days in DP8.06 and four instances of Mach Five 3.2 each with 6-10 channels, mostly multitimbral, on a 2010 iMac. No glitches, and not enough CPU usage to speed up the fans. (One nice unexpected benefit is the billions of EXS24 instruments I can now access in DP, along with some old favourites from my K2000.)

[VitcoMusic]

No problems here.


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[Bennie Sims]

I have had problems. Sometimes when loading a song where MachFive was used it fails to find the audio samples I'm using. Also if I leave it open while running the sequence it bogs down DP 8.06. I may reinstall it and see if that straightens it out.

[Tidwells@aol.com]

MachFive 3.2 on Mavericks10.9.1 keeps crashing DP 8.06 on my MacBook Pro. Usually twice per hour when doing recording or editing. I've upgraded MachFive, the Mac OS, and DP since the crashes started. (Started with MachFive 3.1, Mavericks 10.9.0, and DP 8.05). Nothing helps. MachFive is the only virtual instrument I'm using except for light use of the Garritan Instant Orchestra (which has no problems) and I only use Motu's plug-ins. The crash reporter says it is MachFive which appears to be crashing DP. I've reinstalled MachFive & DP numerous times and of course repair permissions after each install. So far, I have not upgraded to Mavericks 10.9.2. I may try that next.

Some users have said the latest version of Motu's universal driver update caused problems, so I "went back" to version 1.6.59200 (I think). Still no improvement. I use a Motu Audio Express for audio & MIDI i/o.

In addition to the crashes, on average twice per hour some of the MachFive tracks I have pre-rendered (by closing the MachFive instance window) become silent and drop out of the mix. At first, I "resurrected" them by closing and reopening the project, but now I've found it's quicker to simply click on "configure hardware driver", then click "done" without making any changes. This brings all the tracks back to life more quickly.

Doug

[Tidwells@aol.com]

Update: I upgraded to MachFive 3.2.1 a few days ago and so far it is no longer crashing DP 8.06! This is a great improvement. I still have the problem of pre-rendered MachFive tracks going silent and having to "resurrect" them by reconfiguring the hardware driver, but this is progress! This inspired me to greater bravery and I upgraded to Mavericks 10.9.2. So far so good....

Doug

[apanacci]

Working on a song with just M5. Loaded acc bass and piano. DP works sluggish here. Weird. M5 is weird with Ivory so I stayed away from thinking using the piano in M5 would be better. but DP just does not feel good while working with M5 until I bounce tracks to disk and then remove it from the sequence. I have 24 gig of ram and I am running 64 bit Mac Pro

[Killahurts]

Hey Apanacci, really important.. what version of Mach 5 version 3 are you using?

[apanacci]

Latest version of M5 and DP. Strange I thought it that those 2 would work together well. I am going to try M5 in my PT 11 setup on another drive in my studio with the same 2 instruments to see how it works.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

More complex instruments should be on their own channel in separate instantiations of M5 (or any other VI for that matter). It allows for threading to separate processors which can seriously increase efficiency. When you say it doesn't "feel right" could you be more specific? Latency? Other performance issues?

[apanacci]

When I go to save as I am working the program "stops and freezes for a second". things take a split second to react. Things are still playing though. I am going to try what you are suggesting tomorrow and let you know if that works. Thank for the info !

[Killahurts]

When you say it doesn't "feel right" could you be more specific? Latency? Other performance issues?

I think I know what he means.. it's behavior is sluggish and unpredictable, like its always on the verge of crashing. That's what I've been experiencing with M5.. but I just found out yesterday that I wasn't on the latest version of M5, thought I was. I've installed it, so I'll find out today.

I had to go back to DP 805 because I was having so many problems with 806. I'm now realizing that most of those problems may have been from M5, and another unrelated issue with my input devices..

Maybe I'll try 806 again.

[bayswater]

It's a mystery -- some have big problems with current DP/M5 configurations and others with similar setups have none. I experienced very sluggish M5 performance when I first used it with DP 7. Some experimentation with the streaming settings to make sure M5 was getting as much RAM as possible, and following the advice to use multiple instances, seems to have cleared it up.