Digital Performer 11.33 version

[James Steele]

MOTU AVB devices haven't connected and maintained connection well since the move to silicon. TB or USB.

I can't address issues I have no experience with, but I haven't had any issues with the AVB connection between my 828es and my 24Ai. The 828es is connected via TB3 > TB2 adapter to my M1 Max Mac Studio. The 24Ai is connected via Cat5e cable to the AVB port on the back of my 828es. They lock up every time.

This sort of underscores the YMMV principle that only seems to get worse as our setups become more complex. I spent hours and hours tracking down an obscure bug in Pro Tools. Only happened when one particular plugin followed another on a track. These complex systems get fraught with issues and I worry that it's just becoming too difficult to keep on top of bug fixes for some developers. Doesn't help when Apple introduces bugs.

Regarding your AVB issues, I know that I've read on some forums (might have been Avid DUC) that Apple introduced problems with the AVB port in the OS that has yet to be fixed. Don't quote me, but it I seem to recall it affected the Avid Carbon interface that has no other option to connect to the Mac via AVB and the Mac's Ethernet port. If I recall the workaround was having to buy a TB-to-Ethernet adapter and connect it to that instead of to the Mac. I may have that wrong, but some of these issues get introduced by Apple also.

I have very few 3rd party plugs, and the number of current product plugs that STILL require DP and PT to be opened under Rosetta is a pain in the ass. Developers in major international companies still aren't bothering to make their products compatible almost 4 years in. I have a couple 3rd party plugs that open in DP without DP being Rosetta but PT needs to be under Rosetta to use them.

If you're using Audio Units, it shouldn't be necessary to open DP under Rosetta. Shouldn't being the operative word here. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Boz Digital plugins leap to mind. El Clapo, Le Snappet, Stomp, The Wall, and several other of those plugs are not only still not UB2 (Universal Binary 2), but they cannot take advantage of the ability AU plugins have to run individually in Rosetta 2 without having to launch the host DAW in Rosetta. They will crash the DAW. I've had numerous borderline testy exchanges (me being the testy one) with the Boz behind Boz Digital. He's focused all his recent efforts on rolling out Master Keys which is a piano VI... at the expense of updating his plugs for Apple Silicon. They're very good pianos, but still... it bugs me. He's more or less said that he has to push new products out the door to keep revenue coming in. I had an exchange with him in the comments of one of his FB ads where when pressed the reason was something I suspected: the plugs that haven't been updated relied on programming tools that weren't updated/maintained and left him hanging out to dry... requiring a lot more work than otherwise.

The unfortunate thing is that the consumer has choices. At a certain point, as consumers/customers we can be sympathetic to developers, but as end users it's not our concern why something doesn't work or how difficult it may be to fix. If it is impeding us, and there are viable alternatives, at some point it is worth exploring them. In the case of Boz, I just had to give up on El Clapo and bought Hand Clap Studio by Robotic Bean on sale. I have to find a way to keep going. I feel bad for him, but hey... su problema es no mi problema. I'm sure I said that wrong... but that's the unfortunate reality.

[James Steele]

By the way... I know Avid does this, and PreSonus is now doing this... and I don't want to make anybody angry at me... but it may be that MOTU needs to explore a way of generating more revenue. I know, like Avid, PreSonus is now doing a similar arrangement where you get a perpetual license, but you pay something annually to maintain a support plan where you get updates during the term of your support plan. The last version you owned will never stop working.... but you have to renew support for bug fixes.

I mean I get it... nobody wants to have to shell out money every year. I hardly use Pro Tools at this point (I bought my perpetual license "used" for half price) but I've had to send Avid $199 every October for the last few years. I guess I didn't have to... but I did. For example, PT 2024.10 just dropped today. My support plan just renewed on 10/13. I'd have been stuck on 2024.6. Not like it's a big deal at this point... I have literally just one "test project" in Pro Tools that I pull up every so often and look at. But I felt I wanted to have it on my drive in case I needed it when collaborating with other people, etc.

If what it took for MOTU to have the resources to bear down and really dig in and just fix what's there already meant I had to pay something annually, I would do it. I think we're seeing a shift with a decline in prices for what companies can charge for DAWs and when your revenue only comes in from major updates, it incentivizes new features over fixing what's broken.

Just floating this idea for discussion. I don't know about $199... but I would not be opposed to MOTU adopting an approach like this if the renewal was reasonable and it resulted in them being able to put additional resources onto bug fixes.

[dix]

...Well I have to say that I have NOT experienced all the crashing some talk about here. DP has been pretty stable for me. And as Mike has said it's very often related to a plugin. Don't mistake the fact that because I'm not going to be an apologist for MOTU, I'm going to bash them unfairly.

I downloaded Reaper a while back just to check it out. It crashed on launch every time I tried. I didn't conclude from that experience that Reaper is a buggy unstable program. It was simply a conflict in my system. I haven't yet had the time or inclination to fix it, but I'm positive that Reaper is a viable stable app, and that I couldn get it going if I put some time into diagnosing it.

Honestly, I don't take it seriously when people post that DP crashes constantly, and is unstable. Often those users just don't have the patience or inclination to diagnose and remedy whatever issue they're having. My experience is that the better I know an app the more stable it is for me.

[pencilina]

And how many using Hackintosh on i9, like pencilina? (he may only run DP on his M1, though, not sure)

I run DP on both machines with equal amounts of problems. And BTW, DP on the Hackintosh is about 25% more powerful.

[pencilina]

Honestly, I don't take it seriously when people post that DP crashes constantly, and is unstable. Often those users just don't have the patience or inclination to diagnose and remedy whatever issue they're having.

I left no stones unturned. I'm glad you're not having issues.

[HCMarkus]

My experience is that the better I know an app the more stable it is for me.

This.

[Michael Canavan]

By the way... I know Avid does this, and PreSonus is now doing this... and I don't want to make anybody angry at me... but it may be that MOTU needs to explore a way of generating more revenue. I know, like Avid, PreSonus is now doing a similar arrangement where you get a perpetual license, but you pay something annually to maintain a support plan where you get updates during the term of your support plan. The last version you owned will never stop working.... but you have to renew support for bug fixes.

I mean I get it... nobody wants to have to shell out money every year. I hardly use Pro Tools at this point (I bought my perpetual license "used" for half price) but I've had to send Avid $199 every October for the last few years. I guess I didn't have to... but I did. For example, PT 2024.10 just dropped today. My support plan just renewed on 10/13. I'd have been stuck on 2024.6. Not like it's a big deal at this point... I have literally just one "test project" in Pro Tools that I pull up every so often and look at. But I felt I wanted to have it on my drive in case I needed it when collaborating with other people, etc.

If what it took for MOTU to have the resources to bear down and really dig in and just fix what's there already meant I had to pay something annually, I would do it. I think we're seeing a shift with a decline in prices for what companies can charge for DAWs and when your revenue only comes in from major updates, it incentivizes new features over fixing what's broken.

Just floating this idea for discussion. I don't know about $199... but I would not be opposed to MOTU adopting an approach like this if the renewal was reasonable and it resulted in them being able to put additional resources onto bug fixes.

My feelings on this are it's not the worst method, but it's not the best either. Bitwig do this with their Update Plan, you buy the DAW with one year of free upgrades, and they attempt to release a few improvements throughout the year. It's based of f of point upgrades, so if you bought at 5.1 you get upgrades until 5.2 hits, and depending on where your plan started in the year it could be longer than a year. The issue is that there is no way to know what they're changing, with regular upgrades from DAWs like DP and Live you get about 60% of the improvements in the initial upgrade, then maybe 9 months later they might hit you with that other 40%, we saw this with DP11 for instance.

So besides Reaper being at the older version, I went with upgrading Live to v12 because frankly Bitwig killed their browser, it's a mess now and it wasn't bad before, whereas Live did some solid improvements. Looking at the price for Live over 3 years at $230 for the upgrade VS Bitwig for around $387, that's another thing. The promise was amazing things with a steady money supply coming in for Bitwig, but what you end up with primarily is more embedded plugins, they're great and all, but people have been asking for visible edit grid lines in the arrangement page forever.

I mean if it means another developer can be hired to squash bugs or work on control surface and plugin support, then I'm all for it, but I don't expect that is would increase the ratio of non selling point fixes and improvements.

[Michael Canavan]

My experience is that the better I know an app the more stable it is for me.

This.

Don't agree at all, in almost every case it's plugins that are the heart of the issue, I can't say knowing DP helps me read a crash report. Right now I have some pretty regular crashes on projects near completion, resulting in it regularly getting to 7 crashes noted in the project name from the dialog asking if I want to save XXX 6 as XXX 7. I've seen Matt LaPoints DP project versions when he opens one and often will have that same suspect naming of a half dozen projects in the folder. Almost every crash is just clicking with a mouse somewhere, one was with a key Command.

Talking with one of the moderators of the webinars, he had some crazy bug with Clips as he was trying to help someone through learning it, and it came back to trashing preferences. Then the fun of having to rebuild what gets lost when you do that. A suggestion to rebuild then option drag a copy of your preferences to a folder to use later if they get corrupted is helpful, but completely just wrong to have to do. No other DAW I use in 2024 has had it's preferences trashed and needs to rebuild them, this is just not cool, and no amount of knowing your DAW is going to persuade me that I would or should have to do this. MOTU hopefully are doing some deep cleaning for 12 because this is just a bit frustrating. Logic apparently got AU plugin sandboxing, Bitwig has had it forever, Reaper has it, and Live just doesn't have issues with it's evaluation process, plugins that do not pass don't even show up in Live.

There are multiple areas for improvement with stability in DP as it stands at 11.33.

[HCMarkus]

Don't agree at all, in almost every case it's plugins that are the heart of the issue, I can't say knowing DP helps me read a crash report.

I'm not good at reading crash reports, either, although one can at least occasionally spot the troublesome process by reviewing them. I interpret dix's remark as meaning "When we find things that crash a program, we find ways to work around them." We find approaches that allow us to accomplish our goals and use them consistently.

Example: When DP started crashing almost every time I dragged a soundbite from the Tracks Window to my Desktop, I stopped doing that and used DP's right mouse button Export command to accomplish the same thing.

Example 2: When DP was crashing when I Hid Takes after comping, I got used to saving before hiding. When the project was re-opened, the track could be hidden and DP would never crash. (That issue appears to have been resolved, as I am no longer getting crashing when Hiding Takes.)

When we know a program, we tend not to ask it to do things it is not happy doing. This doesn't mean DP is perfect and can't be improved. But it doesn't mean DP is unusable, either.

[nk_e]

FWIW, feed a crash report (or as much as you can of it) into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze what happened. Quite often, useful info comes out of it. (At least to me, I can't interpret those things besides identifying the thread that crashed -- and that's only because it tells me which one it is! )

[HCMarkus]

FWIW, feed a crash report (or as much as you can of it) into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze what happened. Quite often, useful info comes out of it. (At least to me, I can't interpret those things besides identifying the thread that crashed -- and that's only because it tells me which one it is! )

Great idea!

[dewdman42]

By the way... I know Avid does this, and PreSonus is now doing this... and I don't want to make anybody angry at me... but it may be that MOTU needs to explore a way of generating more revenue. I know, like Avid, PreSonus is now doing a similar arrangement where you get a perpetual license, but you pay something annually to maintain a support plan where you get updates during the term of your support plan.

I'm sorta for it and sort of against it. I mean I am willing to pay something every year. But I would prefer that they have us pay on delivery, not in advance. I don't like subscription plans because the customer pays in advance and the developer does whatever they feel like. I'd rather have them release a few version every year and charge me $100 a year or whatever and if I like what they did I will pay for it. Make it $150 if you want, fine.
Probably in most cases I will. You're right that the feature wars are mostly over...sort of. i mean dp has fallen out of favor lately, and they are behind the curve on a few things like mixing atmos and other things that the other DAW's have made numerous releases since DP11 can out even, and are way ahead on. DP's release cycle is very slow. With less and less people using it, they will get less revenue and they will then be unable to continue aggressively supporting it as seems to be more the case with some other DAW's in comparison. It's a vicious cycle. Dp still has some compelling features that none of the others have...and as small but loyal devoted user group that loves those features and loves dp, but there is a huge audience out there that DP is missing the boat on and they do need to seriously upgrade the app in certain ways to try to capture that market share...or else eventually it will die on the vine completely which would be super sad. Doing a subscription of it I feel will only keep the user base small and it will not grow, it will maintain status quo and try to fix the problems..so that small user group will at least keep it running, but the business model for MOTU is not gonna work very well unless they massively increase their user base...which means they need to bring certain new buzzy features for sure...and something that will cause a large number of Cubase, Logic, S1 and Reaper users to consider cross grading to DP. that kind fo stuff I am not in favor of funding development by paying in advance. They need to develop it and sell me on it, then I'll pay for it if I like what they did. that process is what keeps their marketing dept busy figuring out what it is the market actually wants and developing that, rather then developing whatever they feel like doing with the subscription money they got ahead of time.

Capturing market share does matter to us too, as devoted users. I may not seem like it, but the more market share they have, the more resources they can allocate to keeping the product going, fixing problems and everything else. Having market share it's important for devote dp users also. I think it's a mistake to relegate it to relatively smaller number of users and paying a subscription to keep it going, like Sibelius for example which is doomed to die eventually. DP needs to stay relevant to the mass market...which means it needs to compete with new features too.

[Michael Canavan]

I'm sorta for it and sort of against it. I mean I am willing to pay something every year. But I would prefer that they have us pay on delivery, not in advance. I don't like subscription plans because the customer pays in advance and the developer does whatever they feel like. I'd rather have them release a few version every year and charge me $100 a year or whatever and if I like what they did I will pay for it. Make it $150 if you want, fine.
Probably in most cases I will. You're right that the feature wars are mostly over...sort of. i mean dp has fallen out of favor lately, and they are behind the curve on a few things like mixing atmos and other things that the other DAW's have made numerous releases since DP11 can out even, and are way ahead on. DP's release cycle is very slow. With less and less people using it, they will get less revenue and they will then be unable to continue aggressively supporting it as seems to be more the case with some other DAW's in comparison. It's a vicious cycle. Dp still has some compelling features that none of the others have...and as small but loyal devoted user group that loves those features and loves dp, but there is a huge audience out there that DP is missing the boat on and they do need to seriously upgrade the app in certain ways to try to capture that market share...or else eventually it will die on the vine completely which would be super sad. Doing a subscription of it I feel will only keep the user base small and it will not grow, it will maintain status quo and try to fix the problems..so that small user group will at least keep it running, but the business model for MOTU is not gonna work very well unless they massively increase their user base...which means they need to bring certain new buzzy features for sure...and something that will cause a large number of Cubase, Logic, S1 and Reaper users to consider cross grading to DP. that kind fo stuff I am not in favor of funding development by paying in advance. They need to develop it and sell me on it, then I'll pay for it if I like what they did. that process is what keeps their marketing dept busy figuring out what it is the market actually wants and developing that, rather then developing whatever they feel like doing with the subscription money they got ahead of time.

Capturing market share does matter to us too, as devoted users. I may not seem like it, but the more market share they have, the more resources they can allocate to keeping the product going, fixing problems and everything else. Having market share it's important for devote dp users also. I think it's a mistake to relegate it to relatively smaller number of users and paying a subscription to keep it going, like Sibelius for example which is doomed to die eventually. DP needs to stay relevant to the mass market...which means it needs to compete with new features too.

You make the points I made then forgot to hit send on and got deleted in my browser, well. Subscriptions like what Presonus Studio One and Bitwig are decent, but the issue is you pay for features before they come out without knowing what they will be, or you stay behind in upgrades until you get features that you want. Currently with Bitwig I'm at 5.1 because it introduced a crap browser that is worse than what it replaced, and it IMO encourages Bitwig to prioritize plugin development over arranger features and deep changes to the way Bitwig works, and that's evident with the amount of new plugins Bitwig gets yearly.

I'm not sure what DP's direction is in terms of new users? I think they made a concerted effort with Clips and I don't know what MOTU think of the response to it is? I really like DP but the UX needs work, there is lots of room for improvement in the way commands are presented to the users, and overall workflow in DP. The fact is a DAW can survive on around 20k users, especially if the developers are also working on drivers and software for audio interfaces etc.

I think personally solidifying DP in general is the major hope I have for DP12. Things like plugin sandboxing, not having preference files be corruptible, making sure that the Windows versions reputation as less stable is a thing of the past (Cubase did it), giving options for a setup file that holds all your preferences like what Reaper does.

Shoring up parts of DP that are just big WTF moments like not being able to drag a looped clip in the Tracks window, Clips are not visible in the Drum editor, and our personal favorite the lack of track or plugin automation in V-Racked plugins.

I get they need to do Atmos, but I really think overhauling what they have is where I would love to see it go, because besides AI drummers etc, they have the bases covered, just not that great. I don't think any of us think the Content Bowser is that great, it's main decent thing is Clippings but the fact you can't directly adjust the preview volume of audio being previewed in the Content Bowser or Soundbites, and that audio with tempo data does not play back locked to tempo is far behind the times, sxome parts of the Content Browser do absolutely nothing, you can't drag a preset from it into a plugin, it just shows you the preset without doing anything at all constructive, little improvements to the Drum editor would make it much more useable, etc. etc.

In general things in DP should not take three plus steps to do, I get that it's a do all DAW so it's complicated, but some things are left just too buried to be useful or unchanged for too long, I liked the overall UX changes in version 7, that was a huge breath of fresh air, and got me 100% back in DP, I think they need that sort of interface overhaul again.

I'll say this as well, I know I don't run an audio software company, but the model of $500 up front for a DAW that is not Pro Tools has mostly disappeared. Most DAWs can be had for half that, and I think it would do them well to halve that amount. Upgrades are where an older company like MOTU is going to get money for DP, there isn't a flood of users coming in, and making the entry price at Pro Tools, Live Suite level is wishful thinking IMO. The Competitive upgrade is $395... I think if a company did the modern subscription plans like Bitwig and did not have a high initial price they would do very well. Say it was always $125 a year for the latest version, you always got to keep whatever version you landed on and the initial price was $200. I think that DAW would do very well. For instance right now DP11 is at 3 years 4 months. That would be $375 from the audience that wanted every upgrade, and smaller amounts from people that wait for more features etc. it works out to more that the $195 DP12 will likely cost.

[dewdman42]

everyone has their own list of specifically what they want in DP12. Make your voice known to MOTU.

In any case, paying for a subscription up front in my view will definitely not promise anything, but I am definitely more than willing to pay for more regular updates to DP, if they spent more time working a lot of different things including bug fixing, cleaning up the UI, and new features too...etc..all of it..I am more than willing to pay.

But if they want to get a larger market share, which will benefit us all, then they do need to modernize the UI and make sure to keep up with what the market desires..which is bigger then any one of us... and may involve yes big new features...though personally I think they were in error to create the clip browser they did, as an example you gave. turns out they were probably not right about what the market really wants with that one. The topic of how marketing depts go about determining that is beyond my expertise, but I know it's a big topic and requires a large effort to get right, the market research that is.

On the other hand if you relegate improvements down to just mundane things like fixing bugs and keeping it working on the latest version of MacOS...their user pool will slowly diminish towards nil. A small group will keep using it until they die as long as MOTU keeps maintaining it, but at some point if the user pool shrinks enough, then they won't. that's why market share matters for you and for me.

[bayswater]

I assume DP is a lower priority for MOTU than the software required for their hardware. While we can work around anomalies in DP, if the drivers and device related apps don't work properly, the devices are useless. From what I see here, it's a long haul to get things to work with Windows, and then there is the never ending chase as Apple updates macOS. Not even Apple is always able to keep up with that.

It's not good that James is unhappy with DP. One of the reasons I use it is that I can get help here with things that don't seem to work or are difficult to figure out. If the forum disappeared, I'd be thinking more about alternatives.