Beachballs on the reg - RESOLVED

[muxlow]

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has tips on addressing the spinning beachballs that I've been encountering enough to make me write this post. They always resolve but sitting for 30-60 seconds after copying or pressing record or some other mundane task really kills the mood.

Specs:
[*] M2 Mac mini
[*] 16g memory
[*] macOS 13.6.1 Ventura
[*] Digital Performer 11.31
[*] Motu 24Ao

Notes:
[*] I restart regularly
[*] I compact sessions and delete Undo history regularly
[*] I thought it was because my one session is particularly large, but it happens on smaller ones as well

Barring the major debugging routes (disabling plug-ins, booting safe mode, OS reinstall, etc.), are "best practice" tips to keeping things running smoothly?

Also bonus points if you can verify that it's safe to upgrade to Sonoma with DP 11.3.1. I'm mid-major-project and it seems unwise.

Thanks!

[mikehalloran]

Are you a long time DP user?

Do you use Kontakt?

[muxlow]

About 20 years. No Kontakt.

[Michael Canavan]

I would not upgrade to Sonoma until at least version 14.5 is out.

The firs place to look is always plugins IMO, if you can handle it, disable all your plugins in the Preferences/Plugins menu, make a copy of your current set first though.

After that if it doesn't work it's drivers.

[mikehalloran]

About 20 years. No Kontakt.

Ok. Deleting the VI cache files solved this for many of us. Not to worry about deleting anything necessary as all apps rebuild missing caches and preferences when necessary. I now do this once a year.

To delete the VI caches, open the following folder: com.motu.MotuAudioSystem You can use the Go menu or navigate as follows.

/Users/(account name)/Library/Preferences/com.motu.MotuAudioSystem/

Delete any cache files there including Audio Unit Info Cache 64-bit, VST3 Info Cache v2 and VST Info Cache 64-bit plus any 32 bit versions.

Reboot. When you relaunch DP, the caches will rebuild and your plug-ins will re-verify.

When I did this, I also found AudioDesk caches going back to the 1990s in there.


Another maintenance routine is to Reset Launch Services. This resets them for your System and all of your applications. This is another that I now run annually. Since your Mac is fairly new, this should have little effect. If, however, your machine takes too long to boot or shut down (or doesn't shut down at all) or if any app—especially DP—routinely takes too long to launch, do this. This resets Launch Services to default.

1. Open Terminal and run these commands (copy and paste):
2. /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network <Enter or Return key>
3. killall Dock <Enter or Return key>
4. sudo mdutil -E / <Enter or Return key> (enter Admin password when prompted, then <Enter or Return key>)
5. Restart your Mac


If neither of these does it for you, I'll give some tips on how to find old .kxts that might be trying to load or other bots that get in the way.


I agree with staying away from (or upgrading) Sonoma until macOS 14.5 is released. The current version, 14.4.1 has major issues.

[muxlow]

We may have just had a breakthrough.

I've been trying to just live with the beachballs since posting this thread, but it became truly insufferable today.

I started following some of the advice here and while digging around, found "WD Security" in my login items (macOS). Then I found WD Security in my Applications folder and as of now, I think Western Digital somehow installed crapware on my machine that was effecting my recording drive (all my sessions are saved on a WD drive). That sounds wrong but I really can't imagine under what circumstance I'd have ever said "yeah install this" to something like that.

I expunged the WD junk, removed the Audio Units cache I found, did some other maintenance items, rebooted, and SO FAR no beachballs.

THANK YOU ALL for the advice and getting my thinking about this.

[James Steele]

I expunged the WD junk, removed the Audio Units cache I found, did some other maintenance items, rebooted, and SO FAR no beachballs.

Excellent news! I will more this as resolved! Thank you for coming back and sharing the solution, by the way. That helps us build up a repository of information that another user might search and find in the future and save some of the headaches. Great that you found the culprit!

[muxlow]

After expunging the WD software that was on my external drive with all my sessions, things were fine for a while. Then the beachballs started up again. Maybe not as frequently but enough.

I moved my session to my system drive to no effect. Then I unmounted all my external drive and this seems to have done the trick as I have virtually no beach balls any more. It seems that DP was spinning up one or more or all of my drives from time to time, usually when I pressed record, hence it being so infuriating. The most likely culprit was the small drive I have drum libraries on, as there was a drum plug-in in the session (but it was disabled so it really makes no sense). I'm not troubleshooting this until I have to, so this is all I can share at the moment.

FWIW, I also turned off Sharing as DP was forcing a network scan when I would try to export things. It would just hang for at least a minute, maybe longer, looking for network drives for some daft reason (I had none attached, and was saving files to my system drive).

With those changes, things seem peachy.

[mikehalloran]

You can host VIs on your external but never host apps or plugins there.

Another gremlin that I’ve had to purge was anything Corel. It’s not the apps but their license manager that keeps hanging up my Mac by phoning home looking for updates. Unfortunately, purging that made the apps inoperable.

Although Corel bought Roxio, Toast is unaffected by this. Now that Soundflower is deprecated as of Sonoma 14.3, some of Toast’s functionality and bundled apps are crippled or slow but Toast still works fine for burning CDs and DVDs.