Spinning wheel when opening projects

[ironchef_marc]

I'm in the middle of a movie. I went back to earlier cues I did a couple weeks ago and the projects won't open and I get the spinning wheel. Needless to say I am in panic mode!

Tried my back up files, same thing.
My setup hasn't changed since and did a check on the disks and no issues found.

Any ideas on how to debug this and find what is causing DP to not being able to load the project?

[Shooshie]

Could a drive be going out?

I'm not sure it even has to be going out. This happens to me sometimes, and the "cure" for my system has been to switch to the Finder, select all the hard drives, and open them. The same thing happens when saving from other apps, such as Safari, Mail, Excel, etc. By going to the Finder and opening the drives, it gets past the communication gap that's blocking some drive(s) from spinning up, and everything returns to normal. It usually happens only once per session. Of course, with DP I turn off the drive sleep option before starting a session, so I don't usually get this problem.

It has not been happening lately — a month or two, maybe — and I do not know why. Nor do I know what caused it to start happening, unless it was Yosemite or a Yosemite update. Or... it MAY BE a drive going out!

Of course, none of this may even be related to your problem. But if it is, it's a relatively simple fix, even if aggravating and uncalled for. If you can pinpoint the drive that's not spinning up, replace it!

Shooshie

[mikehalloran]

Are you really running DP 8.04 over OS 10.8.2?

I haven't had this issue in a long time but when I did, the following worked: a) do a Safe Boot by holding the shift key on startup. (b) reinstall DP (c) repair permissions

If it reoccurs, open Console and see what else is trying or failing to load with your project. One time, for me, it was an obsolete HP print driver and, when I deleted it, DP behaved again.

[ironchef_marc]

Thanks for trying guys. Definitely not the drive. My system works fine it's just a few projects that I can't open for some reason.

I can't remember ever having that problem and been using DP for 20 years!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Could a drive be going out?

I'm not sure it even has to be going out.

How can one be sure it's NOT the drive until one evaluates the drive health. Just because "a few" projects don't work while others do may be an indication that the few that do work are not impacted (either by a directory error or fragmentation). If it's more recent projects that are acting up, it would stand to reason that they were more recently written to the drive and might suffer from whatever the possible drive error/issue might be..

At the very least, I'd move the projects to a different drive and see if that fixes things. Yeah, it's a PITA, but not as much as slowing your work down, especially on the tight deadlines you have.

Another thing to do is to LOAD the chunks to a new project to be sure the project file isn't the culprit. I hope you get that sorted out.

[Shooshie]

Another thing to do is to LOAD the chunks to a new project to be sure the project file isn't the culprit. I hope you get that sorted out.

I thought of that, but he said that "a few" of his projects are doing this. If it's happening to a few, then something is causing it to happen.

I'd recommend reinstalling DP, then loading chunks into new project files. You don't want to have corruption running rampant through projects. If necessary, go back to saved backups, but you've got to get that corruption out of there.

I've dealt with corrupt files a number of times, and it's not fun, but only once was I ever unable to retrieve the file and save the info. Fortunately, I had already bounced an audio to disc, but I'd always wanted to have those MIDI recordings. (Could always do it again, of course)

In one case with a file that I swore was no good, because I could not get it to open no matter what I did, I sent it off to Magic Dave, for whom it opened right up. He sent it back to me, and it opened fine. What the heck?

There is one other thing that occurs to me, as I write about past experiences and memories come flowing in, and that's to re-create your VI setups. Write down (or do screenshots) of your parameters, then recreate the VIs from scratch. That has saved several of my projects. I haven't had that problem in a long time, but I haven't been doing as much in MIDI over the past 5 years, either.

Shooshie

[mikehalloran]

Among the things that we do not know is if these projects are sitting on a remote or local drive. Is the drive or enclosure having trouble waking up?

Absolutely, corrupt media can be the culprit. Run Repair Disk from Apple's Disk Utility (and nothing else). If anything shows red, keep running it until it turns green. Then get your data off that drive and onto another ASAP. If you are running regular Time Machine backups, you can skip the 'get the data off' step — replace the drive and restore from Time Kachine.

[ironchef_marc]

I did mention in my original post that the first thing I did was to check all my drives. All in good health. I also tried opening the problem projects from my backup drive and same result. So far only 2 cues out of 60. It's just eluding me why DP can't open them and like I said I don't recall ever experiencing this.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Is there ANYTHING unique or common to those cues? A plug or soundbite, perhaps?

[mikehalloran]

A spinning beach ball will show what process are failing in Console. What do you see?

[ironchef_marc]

I fixed it! Now don't ask me what it was exactly but I suspect it was an issue with Altiverb which I did update from v7.2.4 to 7.2.6 a few weeks ago. When I did the update I only installed the MAS version but not the AU. Found an older v.7.2.2 in components) deleted it and re-install the update.

I don't quite understand why that would cause a problem as all the cues were derived from the same template. In any case, I feel better and less stressed to open previous cues now.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I started crashing every time I instantiated the UVI player. There was an update and I applied it last night. All good again.

Damn plugs!

[mikehalloran]

I fixed it! Now don't ask me what it was exactly but I suspect it was an issue with Altiverb which I did update from v7.2.4 to 7.2.6 a few weeks ago. When I did the update I only installed the MAS version but not the AU. Found an older v.7.2.2 in components) deleted it and re-install the update.

I don't quite understand why that would cause a problem as all the cues were derived from the same template. In any case, I feel better and less stressed to open previous cues now.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Whew!

The simple answer is that DP was looking for something that it could not find. This would have showed up in Console as an "unable to find" or unable to load error or something similar. When you are lucky, the error names something that you can recognize or will point to the correct component when you look in a Google search.

[ironchef_marc]

Actually the problem is back and console isn't giving any clues.
Weird I was able to open those same projects earlier today and now I get the spinning wheel again. Very strange...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Actually the problem is back and console isn't giving any clues.
Weird I was able to open those same projects earlier today and now I get the spinning wheel again. Very strange...

Which has me wondering if the applied update(s) temporarily replaced plist files that have since become corrupted again.

If possible, I'd pull (or temporarily replace) in a copy of the project all plugs and see if it comes back. It sure is sounding like a plug is not writing either a plist or other preference (setting?) correctly.

Also, once you reinstall/update a plug or driver, be sure to repair permissions - DP has become quite sensitive to that being done. I also noticed you're on 10.8.2. Mountain Lion was a solid OS, but I'd also consider updating the OS at some point.