DP10.11 - Pausing multiple times during offline bounce

[kenwheeler]

You might want to check out this thread too:
"Like a Bad Penny.... Bounce to Disk Issues"

[Gabe S.]

You might want to check out this thread too:
"Like a Bad Penny.... Bounce to Disk Issues"

Yeah.....more frustration.....I'm sorry for you guys that this continues to drag on. It's been years now......such a bummer.

I hope you all can get a solution to this someday.....

[mikehalloran]

You might want to check out this thread too:
"Like a Bad Penny.... Bounce to Disk Issues"

I’ve made a number of suggestions to that guy, none of which have been tried. For less than $250, a MacPro 6.1 can be upgraded to a 2TB NVMe blade running nearly 3x faster with twice the storage as the largest AHCI blade installed by Apple. This would allow him to move active projects onto the System drive. Instant upgrade on the cheap.

Many of us do not have “this situation”. In my case, I don’t have it anymore. To address it, I did the following:

Moved all apps and plugins onto my System drive. All active DP projects are also on my System drive.

Per MOTU’s recommendation, all of m current projects are done it templates created in DP 10.11 or 10.13. That helped a lot.

iZotope RX on any of the tracks slows things down noticibly—no hesitation in my setup, though.

Any conversion in BTD slows the process. I have a couple users for whom I need to bounce to 44.1/16. They have old stand-alone recorders that cannot read anything else. I don’t get the hesitation but i goes slower. Bouncing to mp3 takes forever — a one hour stereo track can take 45 minutes to bounce. I use a 3rd party tool for that. TwistedWave handles that same conversion in 4 minutes or less.

I archive my inactive projects onto an external to make space (I generate 5GB–100GB a week between DP and video). Every once in awhile, I have to open one up make some tweaks and bounce again as I did yesterday — I may get hesitation when bouncing but only in this situation —even then, it completes eventually.

So, is there a problem? Yes. Can it be minimized until fixed? Hell, yes.

[bayswater]

I've never had these bounce problems either. I also have apps and plugins on the system drive, although sample libs are all on an external drive, and have been for the last 3 systems. I usually have the active project on the system drive too, but often have them on the drive I use to archive finished project. Even with this I don't have problems with bounce, and didn't when I connected to the drive over FW. I suppose the bounce might be slower, but not that I noticed.

I do recall with DP 8 and before, a bounce took longer than bussing to a new channel and recording in real time, something I always thought strange. But I don't see that any more either.

Has anyone had a reply from tech support at Motu saying they were able to replicate this problem exactly as experienced by a user?

[mikehalloran]

although sample libs are all on an external drive,

here, too except for SampleTank but that's only because rescanning the libraries is faster when on the System drive. Once that is done, I do not notice any difference in overall performance.

To make space, iTunes/Apple Music libraries can be offloaded to an external. How to do it is different in Mojave and later but there's no performance hit or lag either way — same goes for the Movies etc.

[Gabe S.]

I don't track this stuff anymore, so I don't keep up with the latest threads. I just get notified when someone posts in my thread. I'm happy to come back here and chit chat for a moment.

I had a good run with DP for a lot of years thru DP8. I launched my business on DP4. DP9 is when the problems started for me. I have a lonnnnng history as a beta-tester for other companies like Spectrasonics and Waves and others. (I volunteered to test for MOTU several times and never got a response back). I know how to create recipes and report bugs when I find them. I'm good at retracing my steps. I take videos, screen recordings, make sound recordings, save sessions, presets, send crash logs, anything that will help illustrate an issue. With the offline bounce issues, I did all that with MOTU's tech support----was sending them videos showing it. Never heard anything back. They always said they never heard of the problem before. (I suspect this is some kind of MOTU blanket response policy or something.) I hunted for workarounds but never found anything that got me working consistently without offline bounce pauses.

I've been clear about what my needs are in my daily workflow, which is needing to offline bounce reliably. And that was no longer possible for me. If DP is working for other people, great.

And I feel like I have to say it again----this bounce issue did not happen in DP8. It appeared in DP9 and has been around ever since. When I was using DP9 and 10 and I had bounce issues, I would launch DP8 and do the bounces without any problems. But at some point, it was not viable to run DP8 anymore.

I would argue that I have a top-spec Mac. I would challenge anyone that says my Mac is not up to the task---a 28-core Mac Pro with 96GB of Apple-installed RAM, and all external drives are 4TB NVME drives on a PCI card on the 16x PCI bus running at 2900MB/sec which is the same speed as the internal drive. And I use a Metric Halo ULN8 3d Cat5 interface. I'm QUITE sure this is enough for any audio task.

So, is there a problem? Yes. Can it be minimized until fixed? Hell, yes.

I couldn't. I tried. I reached out through all the official channels. Got nothing in return. I suspect this problem is low on the priority list. It's been around for years. Anyway, not my problem anymore.

[Killahurts]

I would argue that I have a top-spec Mac. I would challenge anyone that says my Mac is not up to the task---a 28-core Mac Pro with 96GB of Apple-installed RAM, and all external drives are 4TB NVME drives on a PCI card on the 16x PCI bus running at 2900MB/sec which is the same speed as the internal drive. And I use a Metric Halo ULN8 3d Cat5 interface. I'm QUITE sure this is enough for any audio task.

As I've stated before, the people that have this bounce to disk issue are the people running the fastest, most powerful systems. I have posted a one hour radio show every two weeks for several years. Five or six stereo and mono tracks, no plugins. When I got this new 16-core Mac Pro, and its 5000MBps PCIe drives, I could no longer bounce the show offline, on account of the hangups. I can't bounce anything over about 15 minutes long on this machine with DP. Solution? My old 2010 12-core machine still works, so I got a little Focusrite interface and I do the radio show on that. Same DP version, same radio show, but works like a champ on the old machine, in High Sierra.

This is not one of the issues that have caused me to switch DAWs, but it is one of the many I won't have to work around anymore.. the next Radio Show will be posted in the new DAW.

[kenwheeler]

After using DP8 on High Sierra for a couple of months with no BTD problems I gave DP10.13 on Mojave another go, and BTD seems to be working flawlessly.

[mikehalloran]

Console.app should show the problem. Have you asked Apple to take a look and see where the hangup is?

[mdoolin]

I've had this problem for years. It seemed to be fixed in DP 11.01 but back in DP 11.03, although I didn't do very many bounces under 11.01 and due to the random nature of the problem it's hard to tell. I recently recorded a very simple project, two mono tracks, with one UAD plugin on each and two more on the master. Bouncing to mp3 or wav causes the pauses. So I disabled all plugins and bounced just one of the tracks. Still pauses.
I'm on a 2013 6-core Mac Pro, 32 GB ram, running Big Sur. DP is on the internal SSD but my projects are on an external HD. I'm not running anything else at the time. No, not the highest-end machine, but come on! it should be adequate to bounce one track with no plugins!

[mikehalloran]

I've had this problem for years. It seemed to be fixed in DP 11.01 but back in DP 11.03, although I didn't do very many bounces under 11.01 and due to the random nature of the problem it's hard to tell. I recently recorded a very simple project, two mono tracks, with one UAD plugin on each and two more on the master. Bouncing to mp3 or wav causes the pauses. So I disabled all plugins and bounced just one of the tracks. Still pauses.
I'm on a 2013 6-core Mac Pro, 32 GB ram, running Big Sur. DP is on the internal SSD but my projects are on an external HD. I'm not running anything else at the time. No, not the highest-end machine, but come on! it should be adequate to bounce one track with no plugins!

A couple things: Bouncing to mp3 involves a conversion process and can take a very long time. 45 minutes to bounce a simple one hour stereo track in my case. I tested that again just now on my 18 core iMac Pro. Any conversion slows BTD but mp3 is the worst.

If you still have the original AHCI SSD in your MacPro 6.1, your Read/Write speeds are 1/3 that of an inexpensive NVMe 3 x4 like the Crucial P2 <$250 including the blade, pin adapter and heat sink for 2TB. Takes 5 minutes to install not counting the data transfer.

Last I checked, Bob Ludwig is still using his 6.1 upgraded with a 4TB NVMe SSD. If it's good enough for him… Anyway, there's a lot of life left in these machines.

[mdoolin]

I had posted a Tech Link with MOTU and as usual they said they'd never heard of this and couldn't reproduce it on their end. But they asked me to send them a simple project with no plugins that does it. I sent it, and they reproduced the problem with it there! They've passed it on to the engineers. Who knows if anything will come of it, but at least I feel vindicated.

Here's a video of the bug in action: http://www.houseofdoolescu.com/video/DPFreezes.m4v I bounce the same 3 minute 2 track song three times. The first time, it bounces normally in about 10 seconds. The second time, it pauses for a full minute before the progress bar even comes up, then bounces normally. The third time, it pauses about 2 seconds in for a full minute, runs for 4 seconds, pauses again for a full minute, then finishes the bounce.

These happen to be WAV bounces. If I do mp3 it does take a bit longer, maybe 15 seconds. But the random pauses are just as likely to occur.

And now I know that it isn't anything specific to my system, since MOTU reproduced it on whatever system they're running.

I also sent them a link to this thread, to prove I'm not the only one having this issue.

[dix]

I'm getting this in DP11.11

I mix to tracks almost exclusively, but really need Bounce to Disk for a project and I'm getting the long pauses as described in the OP. It's clearly a plugin issue, but troubleshooting, trying to figure out which one, under what circumstances is causing the problem, is all over the map. Unfortunately the very crucial FabFilter-ProL2 seems to figure into every scenario.

If I create a project from a New Empty Document the issue is not there, but if I create a project from my user-created vanilla starter document it is. ...pointing to something in that starter-doc I guess. However that doesn't help me with my current projects, all of which stall while Bouncing (almost always)

Has anyone gotten anywhere with this? Is it just me with this issue in DP11?

[James Steele]

Has anyone gotten anywhere with this? Is it just me with this issue in DP11?

I'm still getting my studio configured with the new Mac Studio, so I haven't had a chance to encounter anything like this yet. My fear is, though, that if this issue was close to being solved at some point, now that you add another variable—the M1/M2 processors—it might be more difficult to pin down. I'm just speculating, but it might be that MOTU's "neat" capability of letting you run non-native plug ins using Rosetta 2, WHILE DP itself is running native, could contribute to some issues.

It would be an interesting test to see if, assuming the project contained some non AS-native plug-ins, whether launching DP in Rosetta 2 mode would affect the results? Might even be smoother?

Again... just a guess. I'm still getting things sorted out with my studio modernization and haven't really done any *serious* work in DP 11.11 yet. Mostly just loading old projects and fixing incompatibilities from missing or outdated plug-ins.

[dix]

A good guess, but even on a new project, created from my user created Starter Template, with only one native plugin (FabFilter-ProL2) on one track, I get the issue most of the time whether DP is running native or in Rosetta.

I can also confirm this also happens with DP11 on my 5,1 cMP at about the same intermittency