Please help me guys.

[delcosmos]

Hello guys,

Something very weird is happening with my DP 8.07.

Everything was very stable until today, DP Crashed and when I relaunch it, it gets stuck at splash startup.

I tried everything, restarted the computer, started in safe mode, re installed DP and nothing could fix the problem.

Then I saw a post here that trashing the "com.motu.DigitalPerformer.plist" and the "com.motu.DigitalPerformer" prefereces could fix some things.
So I did it and that fixed the problem, after trashing all this it started again without a problem and
I had to configure everything again on DP, my commands, my windows, every preference I always modify in DP...

Everything was cool, but then I got another crash and guess what... when relaunch, DP got stucked at startup again

So I had to trash again those "com.motu" preferences again and start over.

I don't know what's happening, my system was very stable before.

Can you help me here? I would really appreciate it, I'm in the middle of a project right now and really need to fix this.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Start with the OPT key and disable plugs. Add them back in from the pref window until one crashes DP. If DP crashes again...

Reinstall the app (you can do it right on top of the old one but be sure to delete all the plist files as those might also be corrupted).

I'm guessing it's a plugin. Even plugins have plists of their own, so if one of those goes south it can bring DP down. So if plan A (above) works until a particular plug is active, you might want to also find the plists for the plug (if any) and delete that.

And none of this might help - but it couldn't hurt.

[delcosmos]

Start with the OPT key and disable plugs. Add them back in from the pref window until one crashes DP. If DP crashes again...

Reinstall the app (you can do it right on top of the old one but be sure to delete all the plist files as those might also be corrupted).

I'm guessing it's a plugin. Even plugins have plists of their own, so if one of those goes south it can bring DP down. So if plan A (above) works until a particular plug is active, you might want to also find the plists for the plug (if any) and delete that.

And none of this might help - but it couldn't hurt.

Thanks for your responce.

I already tried the "hold option key while starting up" and it still gets stucked, very weird!

[HCMarkus]

Save your preferences before trashing to save a lot of hassle rebuilding.

Anything else changed lately on your system? Checked RAM?

[cuttime]

Got a Time Machine backup? You could try loading your user prefs from before everything went south.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I'm thinking it's not the prefs if he already trashed them. Something is corrupted. I'd just reinstall DP at this point. Are other audio apps p[laying well with your interface(s)?

[doodles]

SO weird. EXACT same thing started happening to me this week. Haven't changed anything! Dread crash on quit is back.

Try disconnecting all firewire drives as well. Obviously restart computer and any connected usb/audio devices. And switch off wifi. And trash preferences.

[mikehalloran]

If you are getting stuck at the splash screen, reinstall DP again, reboot and repair privileges in Disk Utility.

Make sure that in System Preferences/Security & Privacy/Allow apps download from the middle or lower box is checked and you allow DP 8 to be installed in the default location.

I had to do it three times in a row once.

If you want to see what the problem is, open a Console window. See if anything is trying to load but failing. If it is the Mackie HUI Plugin, reread my first sentence – that is the normal symptom of the problem.

Every time I have had this problem it was after an OS upgrade or a plugin installation. 100% of the time.

[doodles]

If you want to see what the problem is, open a Console window. See if anything is trying to load but failing. If it is the Mackie HUI Plugin, reread my first sentence – that is the normal symptom of the problem.

Mike, how exactly do I do this? I've been trying to see a crash log or something in console, but can't find one for DP. I called MOTU, and theys aid there's no way to find out what's causing unexpected crashes in DP, bar trying to take out one plug in at a time. I thought it might be 32 lives, but have no idea and in middle of soundtrack so no time to experiment!

[bayswater]

When you're testing to see if you have a bad plugin, don't take out one at a time. Take out half of them. If that fixes it you know the other half has the bad one. Load half of those. If it still works, you know the other quarter has the bad plugin. And so on. Rinse and repeat until you have it down to two possibilities. This way you can check 256 plugins in 8 steps instead of up to 255 steps.

[mikehalloran]

If it's the MOTU HUI plugin, it's a sign that DP is corrupted and must be reinstalled.

DP will attempt to boot loading everything twice in a row. The third time, it will skip those processes but it will glitch big time and often crash. If the HUI plug, you will see it fail to load the first two times but won't get called the third. I stopped counting how many times it has happened to me – a dozen, perhaps? On reinstall, it loads and I know it's good.

Open a Console window. Launch DP 8. You will see the processes that load and those that do not. What is trying to load but failing as DP starts up?

There are many processes that will load, others fail. This is normal. You are looking for something that is repeatable.

Ahhh, I left one thing out. If you have DP 7 on the same system, uninstall and reinstall that first using the uninstaller on your CD. Then reinstall DP 8.

[delcosmos]

Thank you all for your responses,

In my case I suspect it is a corrupt preference, because I already took out all the plug ins and also reinstalled DP and the problem remains.

The moment I trash com.motu.digitalperformer" preference, it opens fine.

But if I make a force quit or for some reason DP crash, the problem appears again.

I think I would have to reinstall everything, I was trying to avoid that because I have tons of work to do.

Best.

[mikehalloran]

Console.app is in your Utilities folder and is part of the OS. It shows everything happening at the system level and you can drill down by expanding on the lines.

If you get a repeatable result, you can copy and paste into a Tech Link on MOTU support. Only copy the few lines that show up as DP crashes.

Console is there to help ID problems. I've seen HP 2005 print drivers try to load ??? remove them and DP worked again. One time, Time Machine was saying that the backup would take over a year ... Console showed that it was choking on Finale 2009 Help files -- this was in 2012 and I had upgraded Finale twice -- again, removing the offending file with the old code fixed the problem.

You and everyone trying to help you are making blind guesses -- me included. If DP is crashing on startup, it should show up in Console. It's far easier to fix a problem when you can see it.

[doodles]

Console.app is in your Utilities folder and is part of the OS. It shows everything happening at the system level and you can drill down by expanding on the lines.

If you get a repeatable result, you can copy and paste into a Tech Link on MOTU support. Only copy the few lines that show up as DP crashes.

Console is there to help ID problems. I've seen HP 2005 print drivers try to load ??? remove them and DP worked again. One time, Time Machine was saying that the backup would take over a year ... Console showed that it was choking on Finale 2009 Help files -- this was in 2012 and I had upgraded Finale twice -- again, removing the offending file with the old code fixed the problem.

You and everyone trying to help you are making blind guesses -- me included. If DP is crashing on startup, it should show up in Console. It's far easier to fix a problem when you can see it.

fantastic. Thankyou. I'll start to get obsessed with console now

[stubbsonic]

I can warn you, it might be a long and complicated slog. I had problems last year that were very tricky to track down.

It is even now difficult to track down what caused what. There was a suspicious audio interface driver (the MIDI portion), there were damaged AUs and/or AU prefs, there was lots of trashing of prefs, moving AU components around, reinstalling, repairing permissions. And ultimately, after 3 or 4 from-the-ground-up fresh installs, It finally started working, again.

I'm sorry to be so dire, but because I never really found out the true culprit, all I could do was install the latest versions of things (or in the case of the interface driver, first an older version, then an even newer version). It was pretty awful.

I really hope you don't have to deal with that.