Saw DP7.1 at NAMM Today!!!

[michkhol]

The stated CRASH problems should for sure be addressed to the MAC setup as DP7.02 is exceptional reliable and stable on OSX Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. PPC and Intel.

Did you do a OSX drive "repair permission"?
Check your third part AU´s too.

Please advise how to address crash problems in the MAC setup if DP trips over itself in its own internal frameworks?

As for the ubiquitous "repair permissions" magic-solution-once-and-for-all, a well designed application should report permission problems (if any), not crash. Crash is understandable for a college student project, so if DP indeed crashes due to incorrect permissions, it only shows the true skill level of MOTU programmers.

[martian]

we's all guinea pigs innit?

did anyone notice if the speed of saves has improved? mines at like 20 -40 secs..

fortunately it aint crashing much these days/./.

i guess a reliable save every 15-20 min is welcome.. the new prefs sound nice - dont mess with my playback.. and incremental.

new auto tools sound great - dont suppose they went as far as key strokes.. but sounds interesting

hope it's more stable than snappier/./

[Phil O]

So what I really want to know is... has MOTU addressed the stability of their software? I guess I'll find out when I download the update.

Very few people have been experiencing frequent crashes. I've been running DP 6.03 on an Intel Mac with Snow Leopard and it's the most stable version I've had since version 3, and people keep telling me how much more stable v7 is than v6. If you are getting several crashes per session, I'd be looking for 3rd party software, a bad install of DP, or a bad install of OSX as the culprit. This doesn't sound like the norm.

Phil

[newrigel]

did anyone notice if the speed of saves has improved? mines at like 20 -40 secs..

Mine is 3 seconds TOPS! Maybe it's the SSD RAID, or the Velociraptors I don't know but that sure seems like a long time... over half a minute?? Wow!
I find myself merging SB's quite a bit as I work on edits because it's a good practice to keep to help overall performance... there's always the undo.

[martian]

can i ask what your typical session size is?

we are on average 4- 6 meg..

I see your point about merging - but dont reallt work for us - as we doing 20 min reels..

a slow load and long save - arent killers - as some one correctly stated- the last version of 6.03 really has been acceptably stable - ie one or 2 crashes a week ( one week = approx 6 days x 8-14 hours depending on how lucky u are )

so that one crash every 30 hours of run time ( YMMV!!!)

however - it does occasionally "go slow" and sometimes we have to use save as as regular save is stuffed upsomething about a permissions error - ( network drive ejection seems to provoke these errr errors )

on the bright side - I get to write all these lovely posts whilst waiting..

ahhh

so was ricky gervais really that bad last night? he's a fat little man!

[NashvilleJoe]

did anyone notice if the speed of saves has improved? mines at like 20 -40 secs..

Mine is 3 seconds TOPS! Maybe it's the SSD RAID, or the Velociraptors I don't know but that sure seems like a long time... over half a minute?? Wow!
I find myself merging SB's quite a bit as I work on edits because it's a good practice to keep to help overall performance... there's always the undo.

+1 on the save speed- perhaps its my esata drives- but i save after every major take- command +S- its almost unconscious at this point- that being said- i also am conscientious about keeping my soundbite folder cleaned up- i can see that DP seems to slow down as those unused soundbites start to pile up. 20 seconds for a save is ridiculous IMHO

j

[Twitch_12]

I've certainly experienced huge save times of 20+ secs. For me it seems to be a result of the VI preset data that gets saved in the project. If I have many Kontakt instances loaded with references to tens of thousands of samples, the preset data saved in the project is large. It's not uncommon for me to have project files over 10MB.

The save times become so unbearable, that I eventually moved all my VI's out to Bibule. Wow, what a difference. The same projects now save in less than a second.

I think Bidule is an essential tool for any DP user making extensive use of VI's. Also, coming from Logic, Bidule provides me what I probably miss most – Logic's environment.

[mikehalloran]

Certain versions of DP are more stable than others. 4.61 and 5.13 are stellar, IMO. I have not upgraded to 7 but am not having problems with 6.03.

If you are getting frequent kernel panic and trashing the preferences doesn't help, take a hard look at your installed RAM. It goes bad more often than you think. There are freeware tools for testing but I use TechTool. I am sending a gig back to OWC tomorrow under warranty - removing the stick cured a lot of intermittent problems.

>If they show the new version at NAMM, it will be out very shortly.<

OK, let the countdown begin. As of today, it's officially "next week". Day one and counting...

Because of mobility issues (I recently had a stroke), I skipped NAMM this year.

[martian]

+1 on the save speed- perhaps its my esata drives- but i save after every major take- command +S- its almost unconscious at this point- that being said- i also am conscientious about keeping my soundbite folder cleaned up- i can see that DP seems to slow down as those unused soundbites start to pile up. 20 seconds for a save is ridiculous IMHO

j

yes 4o is even worse!!!

my projects have above average soundbite counts - even removing unused and flushing undoes often has little effect..



if I did merge all I suppose that it would speed up - but then I would slow down whilst working.. i guess giving the ears a break is a good thing?

[Phil O]

Well I just ordered DP 7. It will be interesting to see what version ships. No mention of 7.1 on their website yet.

Phil

[NashvilleJoe]

I've certainly experienced huge save times of 20+ secs. For me it seems to be a result of the VI preset data that gets saved in the project. If I have many Kontakt instances loaded with references to tens of thousands of samples, the preset data saved in the project is large. It's not uncommon for me to have project files over 10MB.

The save times become so unbearable, that I eventually moved all my VI's out to Bibule. Wow, what a difference. The same projects now save in less than a second.

I think Bidule is an essential tool for any DP user making extensive use of VI's. Also, coming from Logic, Bidule provides me what I probably miss most – Logic's environment.

your savetime story seems a bit odd to me....- i am working on a track with bass, drums piano, rhodes, b3 and a guide vocal- 20.6MB project file and my saves are instantaneous- i am running Mach V, Kontakt, Superior Drummer, B4- and a dozen waves plugins- I will start overdubs this week- and don't expect any changes in performance. i haven't had any significant save times since my Blue & White G3 running DP 2.xx

[Twitch_12]

your savetime story seems a bit odd to me....- i am working on a track with bass, drums piano, rhodes, b3 and a guide vocal- 20.6MB project file and my saves are instantaneous- i am running Mach V, Kontakt, Superior Drummer, B4- and a dozen waves plugins- I will start overdubs this week- and don't expect any changes in performance. i haven't had any significant save times since my Blue & White G3 running DP 2.xx

well, I suppose that might suggest save time doesn't necessarily have a link to project file size. However, the AU data size in the project I was referring to would be considerably higher than your example. In the project I was referring to, I had a complete orchestral mock-up loaded with at least 16 instances of Kontakt alone. I doubt the Waves stuff has much of an impact considering the number of parameters per plugin is much lower than a sampler instrument that could conceivably contain hundreds if not tens of thousands of zones. Multiplied by the number of parameters stored per zone and the size of the AU instrument state being stored for each Kontakt instance can be huge. I wonder if perhaps DP isn't optimized as well as it could be when it comes to storing this data.

Also, if you're not using V-Racks, you could multiply the previous number by the number of sequences in your project. Even if a chunk isn't active, DP still saves the AU parameter state and if you're one to use dozens of chunks in a project, each with its own complete orchestral mock-up, look out – your saves are going to be incredibly slow.

In contrast, projects of similar size in Logic 8 were saving in under 2 - 3 secs. (Though Logic only supports one sequence per project)

I suppose I should also add that I've experienced this behaviour on 3 different systems (All intel macs) with DP versions 6.0 through to 7.02.

Hopefully the addition of auto-save means they've paid some attention to the slow save times. Considering the other posts on this forum from those using large orchestral libraries inside DP, auto-save without optimization will likely be unusable for some.

[KEVORKIAN]

In contrast, projects of similar size in Logic 8 were saving in under 2 - 3 secs. (Though Logic only supports one sequence per project)

How many sequences do you have in the project you are having difficulty saving and do they each have 16 instances of Kontakt loaded or are you using V-Racks for the 16 instances?

[Twitch_12]

How many sequences do you have in the project you are having difficulty saving and do they each have 16 instances of Kontakt loaded or are you using V-Racks for the 16 instances?

well, I was initially duplicating sequences (with VI's) for each cue. (didn't want to make tweaks to one cue and have them effect an earlier cue). I then switched to a V-Rack and saved a clipping for each cue. The performance improvement was noticeable by removing duplicated VI's from sequences but still not as fast as I would like it to be (5 - 10 seconds is still a major drag 20 minutes before a deadline).

I now use Bidule and my save times are down to less than a second for full orchestral mock-ups with a dozen sequences. Not only that, DP simply doesn't crash at all. I don't think it's ever crashed since I moved the VI's outside. It's amazing how much smoother things run when your instruments are on a separate process.

Given the power of Bidule, I can't think of why I'd want to host VI's in DP again.

[Prime Mover]

Yeah, I work with 40+ track orchestral projects (EWQLSO NI and PLAY) with virtually no save time. On the other end, full recorded 30+ track audio-based projects with dozens of takes, numerous VIs, and keep about half an album worth of material in one project, with little to no save times either. No, I haven't checked the actual project file size, but it's gotta be more than 20MB.

So I don't know what's going on on your end. Maybe your projects are bigger, but not by such a magnitude that it would jump from 2seconds to 40seconds. It sounds like it's not a project file size but something else.

One possibility is that some programs start glitching if certain types of media are loaded in the drives. I know Kontakt has gone crazy when DVDs/CDs are inserted into the drive. Maybe DP is searching for a missing volume, and only saving when it confirms that it can't find such volume? That's not an unheard of occurance.

In any case, the problem you are having seems very abnormal and probably not connected to file size. As you know, a computer should be able to load 20MB of RAM to the harddrive in under a second.