Question About Dumping Preferences

[Shooshie]

I've got a fade that crashes DP if I touch it. I started to dump the analysis files, but there are close to 11,000 of them. (10 songs, lots of comps, chopped soundbites, and so forth per song) Is that advisable at this point? Will DP faithfully rewrite all the analysis files as needed? Or is there a better way to find the possibly offending fade's analysis file?

It's been 10 years or more since I dumped prefs as a means of fixing anything. I just don't remember what the do's and don'ts are.

Another thing: I looked into the DP Plist file, and was a little surprised by what I saw. First of all, there appeared to be a line or two about possibly every project I've opened since... I don't know when. There are songs I recorded as far back as year 2000, and I'm not sure I've opened them since. Is trashing the Plist a good idea? Not sure why those songs are in there, and what's up with all that, but I'd hate to lose something important. Surely it writes that as needed, right?

Shooshie

[cuttime]

I see your signature says DP 9.12. The crashes on fades were a well documented bug that had been fixed with 9.13.
Sorry, I know it doesn't directly answer your question.

[Shooshie]

I see your signature says DP 9.12. The crashes on fades were a well documented bug that had been fixed with 9.13.
Sorry, I know it doesn't directly answer your question.

My signature is incorrect. I'm in 9.13. I need to fix that.
Any ideas about dumping prefs? I'd rather not do too much of that.

Shoosh

[MIDI Life Crisis]

19600 posts!

The main thing involved, IMO, as protection is to save the plists in advance of deleting them. Restoring back to the originals is a no brainer then. Time Machine has been invaluable in restoring a "good" plist v. a bad one. They can get corrupted and repairing permissions doesn't fix everything.

I would also remember to delete the MOTU driver plists (audio system stuff).

Except for a few smallish projects, I've not touched DP much recently. I'm either scoring in Finale or playing somewhere live. DP 9.02 was the last "reliable" version on my system. 9.12 had some issues and fades crashing was one of them. There's not much difference between the two versions AFAIK. Supposedly there was a subsequent release under the same ver # (9.12) that fixed the issue. I've yet to install that.

Happy 19600!

[cuttime]

I see your signature says DP 9.12. The crashes on fades were a well documented bug that had been fixed with 9.13.
Sorry, I know it doesn't directly answer your question.

To clarify, it is 9.13 build 72621 that fixes the fade crash.

[Shooshie]

My version of DP is 9.13 (72359). So it appears that we may be onto something there cuttime. Thanks for the info. I'm going to the MOTU site to see if I can find the later build.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Cuttime, if you were female, present, not grossed out by it, and not feeling sexually harassed, I would kiss you right now. Of course, all four of those things being false, I'll refrain, but I'm so relieved and encouraged! I think you just fixed some, if not all, of my problems.

The fade handles in the soundbites are moving easily, whereas in the build I was using before they were recalcitrant and difficult to move. And... voila! No crashes! 'Scuse me while I dance!

Not only that, but I'm not hearing the distortion in the overages. That is, where the busses are barely clipping, I'm not hearing the noise. Of course, that was intermittent before.


The problem now may be getting all my levels back to rational settings. Whatever was going on in that previous build seems to have caused me to set levels all over the place, trying to eliminate distortion while getting things balanced and loud enough. It wasn't working. Now, it seems to be working, and I just need to go back and reset those levels. Of course, it's too soon to tell for sure; as I said above, it was intermittent before. This could be the fix, or it could just be the "good side" playing before the evil side rises up and swipes away all my progress in this Jekyll and Hyde problem I've been having. But I have great hopes that this is the answer I was looking for.

If nothing else, the fade crashes are fixed! That alone is a huge relief.
If you're using DP 9.13 build 72359, upgrade immediately to build 72621.

Oh, and one other thing: it booted in a fraction of the time as the previous build. I think build 72359 was a mistake. This one seems to be more MOTU-like. I think the nightmare is over, and I can get back to my regular dreams of mixes completed!

Will keep you posted.

Shooshie

[cuttime]

'Scuse me while I dance!

While you're at it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sw97NzvvsE

[magicd]

Back in the old days of OS9 part of my troubleshooting procedures included trashing pref files. The smart guys that taught me how to do this work often told me "don't just guess and trash a pref file. Find out what the actual problem is".

Trashing prefs files is a guess. If you need to make that guess because you can't find any other solution there is a benign way to do it under OSX.

Create a new user account in the Apple System Prefs and log in to that account. Not only will you have fresh DP prefs but you'll also have fresh prefs for everything else including the Apple OS. This is a safe way to test the "trashed prefs" theory without actually messing with your original user account.

When you launch DP in the new user account, all will be virgin. That means among other things DP will want to scan from scratch for AU and VST plug-ins. That's really the only drawback, assuming you have many, many plugs.

Analysis files are not the same thing as prefs. Analysis files get created when DP draws waveforms and looks for tempo, pitch, beats, etc. If you trash the analysis files for a project you don't lose any audio data and that does force DP to at least analyze for new waveforms. You can go to the Background Processing preferences in DP and turn off DSP, Beat, and tempo analysis (which I recommend).

One problem we see is if there are many audio files and therefore many analysis files associated with a project. Depending on your housekeeping and file management it's possible to have multiple files with the same names. That's bad.

One way to hide files (such as analysis files) is to move them to the trash (don't empty the trash!). The application can't access a file that's in the trash.

Dave

[Shooshie]

Thanks, Dave. I may not have to do anything. Since updating DP to the latest build, my problems seem to have gone away. Too soon to tell, since they were intermittent, but I'm hopeful.

The identical naming thing worries me. Maybe THAT could account for some intermittent behaviors. Does it sound likely? If DP looks up the wrong analysis file, could it not cause all kinds of problems in a track and thereby in the mix?

Shoosh

[Shooshie]

Also, be sure to check out my post in the other thread, with your name on it. There's the full description of the bizarre stuff.