MOTU DP Problems

[fafner]

Hello, this is my first time posting in a MOTU Nation forum although I have been a MOTU user for many years. I have been having problems with DP for about 12-18 mo. Below is a list of issues in bullet point format, and I would be glad to provide more information. Any assistance would greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Crashing
-while setting u, i.e creating MIDI and instrument tracks
-Using automation
-editing lyrics in Quickscribe window
-recording audio tracks
-clicking the insert button in the mixer window to add a new plug-in

Freezing
-recording audio tracks
-deleting a sequence
-using automation

Unable to open plug-ins or virtual instruments from the mixer window

No effect when clicking the insert button in the mixer window

Tracks randomly play enabled while in the mixer window

Double clicking the track in the tacks window opens the sequence window for a different sequence and attempts to select a different sequence are ineffective

Window does not re-open with the same tracks as last open, even if 30 seconds before

Volume difference (3-5dB) in master faders with same settings.

Audio randomly stops during MIDI playback

These issues are random and unpredictable. Thank you for your time.

[terrybritton]

You did not mention what your typical audio interface ASIO buffer setting was, but all of these symptoms can come from "insisting" that the buffer be super-low for tracking, and then leaving it there for mixing. The lower the buffer setting, the more the audio stream taxes the CPU for that immediacy, and it chokes out so nothing else works correctly.

512 is a happy medium for most tracking, and 1024 is typically the best setting for mixing.

Terry

[Releaux]

Hi Fafner,

For specific recommendations, you'll probably want to provide some additional information:

• Computer model, Amount of RAM
• OS Version
• DP Version
• Audio IO hardware.

The randomness and severity of your problems, however, immediately point me toward a couple of things, and you probably won't like any of them.

1. Something is corrupt. This could be your MOTU / DP preferences, your default template, Plists for DP, the DP executable itself, your project files or even preferences for some plugins. Based on your description, I'd lean toward DP preferences or your template, so isolating and removing those would be the first thing I'd try. Does this behavior happen on new projects, or only old ones?

2. Your OS is crufty. When did you last do a full OS install to a freshly formatted hard drive?

3. You have some RAM that's gone bad. I'm less inclined to go with this one, as you'd probably see instability system-wide regardless of application.

"Intermittent error" is one of the scariest thing you can say in the troubleshooting world. If you can't reproduce the problem consistently, it's really difficult to track down the specific cause.

Based on how pervasive the odd behavior is, and how widespread it is throughout DP, if it were me I'd probably be looking at deauthorizing anything that uses DRM, and then creating a fresh hard system drive, preferably on SSD if you haven't already moved to that.

I would start with trashing preferences and templates, because if that fixes it, then that's a lot less work. If that doesn't do the trick, though, it's time, as Ripley said, to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Before you go that route, though, give us the extra info. There may be something there that someone recognizes as being a problem.

[HCMarkus]

+1 to everything Releaux sets forth above. Start with providing the info requested.

You may have noted that others' signatures include system and other info...

[fafner]

You did not mention what your typical audio interface ASIO buffer setting was, but all of these symptoms can come from "insisting" that the buffer be super-low for tracking, and then leaving it there for mixing. The lower the buffer setting, the more the audio stream taxes the CPU for that immediacy, and it chokes out so nothing else works correctly.

512 is a happy medium for most tracking, and 1024 is typically the best setting for mixing.

Terry

Hi Terry, thank you for the reply. Buffer size is 1024 and I generally leave it there all the time.

[fafner]

Thanks, guys for your posts. I'm not entirely sure how to reply to each individual post so I pressed reply at the bottom.

I saw the information at the bottom of people's posts, but wasn't sure how to do that myself.

iMac 4GHz, i7, 32 GB RAM
DP 9.52
MOTU 1248
MOTU Micro Express

I don't know that I've ever done a full OS install to a freshly formatted hard drive. I did recently run a full diagnostic with Tech Tool Pro, which found no problems. The computer seems to work fine other than a few problems with the mouse and track pad and video playback, but nothing like these issues in DP. The problems pre-date my RAM upgrade about six months ago, and although that made things run quite a bit easier, it did not solve the majority of the problems.

The intermittent part is the most frustrating of all. There seems to be no pattern, and some, like the MIDI audio cutting out is completely unpredictable, except that it will happen at some, indeterminate, point in the future.

This iMac has an SSD drive, and I'm sorry for my lack of tech prowess, but I don't know what DRM is and hence, how to de-authorize whatever uses it.

Please let me know whatever other information would be helpful.

Thanks!

[mikehalloran]

What OS? How often do you reboot?

[fafner]

What OS? How often do you reboot?

sorry, OS 10.13.6. I re-boot, which I assume means restart at least once a day, and, with the problems have had to do so much more than that.

[mikehalloran]

What OS? How often do you reboot?

sorry, OS 10.13.6. I re-boot, which I assume means restart at least once a day, and, with the problems have had to do so much more than that.

Maybe.

You can use TTP to measure the amount of free RAM. Run the Memory test after you boot. Do it again after symptoms occur. Once it starts running, you’ll see the amount of free RAM. You can click on the X to stop it once you see the amount as that will disappear when the test is complete. If you need screen shots, I can post them.

[fafner]

Thank You, Mike. I re-started and ran the TTP memory test and it shows 28.66 DB of available RAM. I have a project that I plan to use some virtual instruments so this will be a good time to see if any problems surface. If they do I will run the memory test again. The audio cutting out of MIDI tracks during playback has mainly been EZDrummer and E/W Hollywood Orch. Thanks again.

[fafner]

What OS? How often do you reboot?

sorry, OS 10.13.6. I re-boot, which I assume means restart at least once a day, and, with the problems have had to do so much more than that.

Maybe.

You can use TTP to measure the amount of free RAM. Run the Memory test after you boot. Do it again after symptoms occur. Once it starts running, you’ll see the amount of free RAM. You can click on the X to stop it once you see the amount as that will disappear when the test is complete. If you need screen shots, I can post them.

I froze this afternoon while editing and producing voiceovers with music bed, something I do regularly, usually with few problems. I'm not sure what caused the freeze; I was editing an audio track that had a mistake, and re-recording about five seconds of it when the freeze occurred. As you suggested, I ran a memory test and it showed 25.6 GB available RAM, compared with 28.66 GB the other day with no applications open.

Thanks

[Releaux]

I don't know that I've ever done a full OS install to a freshly formatted hard drive. I did recently run a full diagnostic with Tech Tool Pro, which found no problems. The computer seems to work fine other than a few problems with the mouse and track pad and video playback, but nothing like these issues in DP. The problems pre-date my RAM upgrade about six months ago, and although that made things run quite a bit easier, it did not solve the majority of the problems.

The intermittent part is the most frustrating of all. There seems to be no pattern, and some, like the MIDI audio cutting out is completely unpredictable, except that it will happen at some, indeterminate, point in the future.

This iMac has an SSD drive, and I'm sorry for my lack of tech prowess, but I don't know what DRM is and hence, how to de-authorize whatever uses it.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, and thanks for the additional information.

DRM is "Digital Rights Management" aka copy protection. If the software you use has some form of authorization that writes to your hard drive (as opposed to writing to a dongle like an iLok), you nearly always need to deauthorize that software before doing a drive format. This typically isn't necessary with software that only asks you to input your serial number. This part of the process is the primary reason I don't do fresh system drives more often; it's a giant pain in the keister.

If you have software that uses iLok, but you've authorized to the computer instead of an iLok dongle (in my case, those are things like Eventide plugs, Soundtoys, etc.), you absolutely want to deauthorize before doing any system reinstalls.

Your machine easily outpaces mine, and you're on a stable version of DP, so I'd say that the likelihood of having bad ram, while not zero, is pretty low. Diagnostics like Tech Tool will find some things, but not everything. They're also not great at finding cache corruption or other things that are just a typical byproduct of modern operating systems that have been running for a long time. Sometimes you can run a cleaning tool that will shake some of that stuff loose, but Mac OSX is really pretty good about doing that on its own, especially if you're rebooting/restarting regularly.

One thing I didn't ask earlier is if you're using this machine exclusively as your DAW/audio computer, or if you have a lot of other things installed on it. Do you have anything unrelated to music automatically booting on startup (utilities, dropbox, etc.). Sometimes one of those going wrong can bork everything else.

Even though they don't seem like serious issues, the problems with mouse/trackpad and video playback do indicate that you have some OS-level issues that are probably affecting everything in one way or another. This could be something with USB, mouse, or video drivers having problems, and that also could create weirdness with MIDI playback, etc.

At this point, I would repeat my earlier advice. Start off by moving the preference files for DP and any installed plugins out of their folders to a safety spot. I normally create a temp folder on my desktop for this purpose. I would also delete the cache files for DP and installed plugins. (Don't worry - cache files will be recreated automatically as they're needed). Restart DP, open an empty project using the default "Empty Project" template and see if your problems persist. If it becomes stable, congrats - you're done other than reconfiguring your environment.

If you like, you can start putting preferences back in small groups. If replacing something makes everything go crazy again, you'll know that was a corrupt file.

If those actions don't bring stability, though, you have to decide how much time you're willing to throw at troubleshooting. If you've got paying gigs on the line, I'd just cut bait, back up everything to an external drive, do a fresh format and system install, then reinstall all of the apps. It's probably a day or two to get everything up and running again. You have to balance that time against the time you're spending rebooting and recovering lost work. This is the hardcore version of "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

I had to do this earlier this year because of a hard drive crash and, while a giant, infuriating pain, there are some upsides to doing this from time to time. Your system will almost certainly run faster, and it gives you an opportunity to decide if you really need certain things or not. It streamlined my system quite a bit.

Again, I know this isn't the answer you were looking for. If you have some downtime for troubleshooting, there are certainly additional things you can try, but given your description, I'd probably just go straight for the rebuild, especially if you have paying work that will be suffering (along with your mental state) while you deal with instability.

[fafner]

I don't know that I've ever done a full OS install to a freshly formatted hard drive. I did recently run a full diagnostic with Tech Tool Pro, which found no problems. The computer seems to work fine other than a few problems with the mouse and track pad and video playback, but nothing like these issues in DP. The problems pre-date my RAM upgrade about six months ago, and although that made things run quite a bit easier, it did not solve the majority of the problems.

The intermittent part is the most frustrating of all. There seems to be no pattern, and some, like the MIDI audio cutting out is completely unpredictable, except that it will happen at some, indeterminate, point in the future.

This iMac has an SSD drive, and I'm sorry for my lack of tech prowess, but I don't know what DRM is and hence, how to de-authorize whatever uses it.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, and thanks for the additional information.

DRM is "Digital Rights Management" aka copy protection. If the software you use has some form of authorization that writes to your hard drive (as opposed to writing to a dongle like an iLok), you nearly always need to deauthorize that software before doing a drive format. This typically isn't necessary with software that only asks you to input your serial number. This part of the process is the primary reason I don't do fresh system drives more often; it's a giant pain in the keister.

If you have software that uses iLok, but you've authorized to the computer instead of an iLok dongle (in my case, those are things like Eventide plugs, Soundtoys, etc.), you absolutely want to deauthorize before doing any system reinstalls.

Your machine easily outpaces mine, and you're on a stable version of DP, so I'd say that the likelihood of having bad ram, while not zero, is pretty low. Diagnostics like Tech Tool will find some things, but not everything. They're also not great at finding cache corruption or other things that are just a typical byproduct of modern operating systems that have been running for a long time. Sometimes you can run a cleaning tool that will shake some of that stuff loose, but Mac OSX is really pretty good about doing that on its own, especially if you're rebooting/restarting regularly.

One thing I didn't ask earlier is if you're using this machine exclusively as your DAW/audio computer, or if you have a lot of other things installed on it. Do you have anything unrelated to music automatically booting on startup (utilities, dropbox, etc.). Sometimes one of those going wrong can bork everything else.

Even though they don't seem like serious issues, the problems with mouse/trackpad and video playback do indicate that you have some OS-level issues that are probably affecting everything in one way or another. This could be something with USB, mouse, or video drivers having problems, and that also could create weirdness with MIDI playback, etc.

At this point, I would repeat my earlier advice. Start off by moving the preference files for DP and any installed plugins out of their folders to a safety spot. I normally create a temp folder on my desktop for this purpose. I would also delete the cache files for DP and installed plugins. (Don't worry - cache files will be recreated automatically as they're needed). Restart DP, open an empty project using the default "Empty Project" template and see if your problems persist. If it becomes stable, congrats - you're done other than reconfiguring your environment.

If you like, you can start putting preferences back in small groups. If replacing something makes everything go crazy again, you'll know that was a corrupt file.

If those actions don't bring stability, though, you have to decide how much time you're willing to throw at troubleshooting. If you've got paying gigs on the line, I'd just cut bait, back up everything to an external drive, do a fresh format and system install, then reinstall all of the apps. It's probably a day or two to get everything up and running again. You have to balance that time against the time you're spending rebooting and recovering lost work. This is the hardcore version of "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

I had to do this earlier this year because of a hard drive crash and, while a giant, infuriating pain, there are some upsides to doing this from time to time. Your system will almost certainly run faster, and it gives you an opportunity to decide if you really need certain things or not. It streamlined my system quite a bit.

Again, I know this isn't the answer you were looking for. If you have some downtime for troubleshooting, there are certainly additional things you can try, but given your description, I'd probably just go straight for the rebuild, especially if you have paying work that will be suffering (along with your mental state) while you deal with instability.

Hello Releaux, and thank you for your reply; I greatly appreciate your time. Starting with the DP preference files is where I plan to start using your method. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll look at the rebuild. I usually run only DP when working, although I also have V-Control Pro open. The 1248 uses firefox, but other than that, very little is open when DP is. The issues with the mouse, trackpad, and video playback are limited to safari, as they do not occur when during video playback using firefox. Apple tech support told me that it’s probably due to my using and “old” OS (High Sierra), and they advised that I upgrade at once to Catalina. Mojave is no longer available, and Catalina is obviously not an option at this time. So, they told me to disable all extensions in safari, reboot and try it again, which I did and the problems persist. Looks like I'll be using firefox when for watching instructional videos.

Thanks,

[Releaux]

Hello Releaux, and thank you for your reply; I greatly appreciate your time. Starting with the DP preference files is where I plan to start using your method. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll look at the rebuild. I usually run only DP when working, although I also have V-Control Pro open. The 1248 uses firefox, but other than that, very little is open when DP is. The issues with the mouse, trackpad, and video playback are limited to safari, as they do not occur when during video playback using firefox. Apple tech support told me that it’s probably due to my using and “old” OS (High Sierra), and they advised that I upgrade at once to Catalina. Mojave is no longer available, and Catalina is obviously not an option at this time. So, they told me to disable all extensions in safari, reboot and try it again, which I did and the problems persist. Looks like I'll be using firefox when for watching instructional videos.

I will respectfully disagree with the support rep you spoke with. I have multiple machines and none of them are running anything later than High Sierra right now. In the tech support world, telling people to upgrade is an easy way out of the conversation so you can close the ticket and preserve your metrics.

Of course, I've kind of told you the same thing, only I'm not telling you to upgrade, just reinstall.

Your description of the video issues in Safari but not Firefox definitely makes me think you have some system-level cruft that just needs to be wiped out. This is a normal outcome of running an end-user machine for a long time, and a routine annoyance of modern computing life. Think of an occasional reinstall like changing the oil in your car. It's not sexy, but it's one of the best things you can do for long-term health.

Apple has hidden the older operating systems on the App Store, but it's still possible to download them, whether you want to stay on High Sierra or move to Mojave. Dosdude's tools are highly regarded in the Mac upgrade and Hackintosh communities:

• http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/
• http://dosdude1.com/mojave/"

His site has tools for even older OS versions if you need them, but I'd say you're better sticking with High Sierra. I haven't gotten brave enough to move to Mojave yet, but I'm also not having any issues and my machine is currently nice and stable. Don't fix it if it ain't broke...

Note that because you have a computer that's already capable of running those OS versions, you don't need to bother with any of the patching stuff, but you can use the tools to download the standalone installers directly from Apple. They're big... about 5-6 gigs each, so be ready if you don't have a fast Internet connection.

If you have trouble using those tools, let me know and I'll try to help. They're pretty straightforward, though.

[HCMarkus]

FYI, Mojave is totally available:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210190