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Wow. There have been a lot of heated discussions over DP7.1. I thought I'd start a thread for serious troubleshooting. If we put our heads together we may see some patterns that we can report to MOTU, and as I see it that would be a win-win. PLEASE don't post any crap here about how you don't want to be MOTU's beta tester. If you don't want to help, just post somewhere else. James has been getting a little frustrated with these kind of posts and quite frankly, I'm beginning to share his frustration.

Anyway, I've been noticing that 7.1 is not as stable on my system as 7.02. Not by a long shot. But there is a very different feel to the way things are happening. Past versions have had random crashes, hangs, unexpected quits, etc. In 7.1 they don't seem to be so random. In my case, many of them have been repeatable. This is a good thing. If we can duplicate the problems we know exactly what to report to MOTU. My hope is that if people report what they've found we can begin to tame this animal.

Here's what I've found so far:

-> After initially installing 7.1 I found that the new Markers display in the Control Panel wasn't working. Clicking on a marker would cause an error message. It turns out that DP requires the installation of the font "Verdana." With it turned off, DP halts with a system error message. Turning on Verdana in Font book solved the problem.

-> Many have already discovered the heavy background processing going on when opening a project created in an earlier version of DP. If I try to do work while this processing is taking place, I sometimes get an unexpected quit.

-> I had what I thought was a repeatable crash in DP 7.1. Whenever I tried to access Configure Studio Settings the program would quit. The system log shows this line in every crash:
MIDIServer[241]: PlugIn EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin -- /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/ does not contain a supported architecture.
Removing EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin from the MIDI Drivers folder solved the problem.

-> I had an unexpected quit whenever I tried to access the bundles window in a particular project. I found that closing the spectrum analyzer window in Blue Cat's FreqAnalyst solved the problem. Perhaps many problems we're seeing are third-party related.

Please post your findings.

Phil

Hey Phil O, I think this is a great idea and a very level headed approach. I'm back to working in 7.02, but I have some new songs that I'm developing in 7.1, so I'll do my best to post my experiences. My guess and hope is that motu is committed to the level of excellence they achieved with 7.02.

Phil, *sorry to say* I see nothing you've described here.
Except some little time allowed to rebuild waveforms in old projects.
No crash at all till yet.
Crossing fingers though!

No font problem, nor missing.

BTW, no Garage Band on my system by now.

daniel.sneed wrote:Phil, *sorry to say* I see nothing you've described here.

Call 'em like you see 'em, Dan. The more info we get, the easier it will be to figure these things out. Thank you.

No font problem, nor missing.

That was a problem at my end. I have so many fonts from my graphics work, that I have many sets. I had turned Verdana off, not knowing that DP needed it. BTW, this is the second time the font thing has bitten me with DP. The first time was a missing font that MW EQ needed. I've asked MOTU for a font list, but for some reason they're keeping it a secret.

Phil

-I have had the same background processing problems as you. But I have also had it happen in 7.1 projects a couple of times.

Phil O wrote:-> I had what I thought was a repeatable crash in DP 7.1. Whenever I tried to access Configure Studio Settings the program would quit. The system log shows this line in every crash:
MIDIServer[241]: PlugIn EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin -- /Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/ does not contain a supported architecture.
Removing EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin from the MIDI Drivers folder solved the problem.

That's interesting. I've noticed that I have that same driver in my MIDI Drivers folder. I wonder where that plugin comes from and what application installed it? I have a USB MIDI device (an AXON AX-50), so I wonder if it is connected to that? I'll have to test to see if the device still works after removing the Emagic driver.

Gone back to 7.02 also. 7.1 was verrrrrry slow to respond in many ways.... maybe that was background processing...?
anyway looking forward to the next update. No tantrums here.
Been generally pretty happy with DP7.
Love 7.1's autosave!

I was having some problems in 7.1 which I listed in another post. I had similar things listed in the crash log so I went into my library/audio folder and deleted a few things that looked old and I didn't know what they were. I figured if they were necessary I would just have to reinstall something. It seems to be working so far.

I still have the EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin in there though. So far I think it may be a conflict between that and some legacy drivers.

Pretty vague, but that's what I got.

bb

bongo_x wrote:I was having some problems in 7.1 which I listed in another post. I had similar things listed in the crash log so I went into my library/audio folder and deleted a few things that looked old and I didn't know what they were. I figured if they were necessary I would just have to reinstall something. It seems to be working so far.

I still have the EmagicUSBMIDIDriver.plugin in there though. So far I think it may be a conflict between that and some legacy drivers.

Pretty vague, but that's what I got.

bb

This is probably why the "wipe everything clean and fresh install of OS" ends up working. It's probably massive overkill, but it ends up working for most people who try that.

James Steele wrote:

bongo_x wrote:I was having some problems in 7.1 which I listed in another post. I had similar things listed in the crash log...Pretty vague, but that's what I got.

bb

This is probably why the "wipe everything clean and fresh install of OS" ends up working. It's probably massive overkill, but it ends up working for most people who try that.

I did a clean install of the OS when I got my notebook a few weeks ago, but I imported all my data. I guess you just have to go through things and clean out the crap every once in a while. I've been doing that since I got this thing. Especially since I went to 10.6, lots of housecleaning.

bb

James Steele wrote:This is probably why the "wipe everything clean and fresh install of OS" ends up working. It's probably massive overkill, but it ends up working for most people who try that.

Oy! That's a major undertaking with all of the apps I have on my system, but I see your point. Perhaps I should try a fresh install of OS X on a partition with DP 7.1 and see how it performs.

Phil

As noted in one of the posts, there seems to be an initial rebuilding of waveform displays. So how about we open something, open the tracks list wide and scroll around and then let it sit for a little bit and let the waveforms draw?

One semi repeatable glitch/CPU spike I was getting seems to be related to having WiFi on. After the glitch (either an audio dropout or in an extreme case a burst of white noise) if I look in the activity monitor I see a big spike in network access, even when I haven't been doing anything online.

When I turn it off it stops lots of little spikes and glitches I was getting. I do have Apple Remote Desktop installed (as well as a ton of other stuff) so maybe it's just my configuration. Does anyone else get this?

I just got 7.02 and immediately installed 7.1 as well, so have been going back and forth playing around with them. FYI 6.02 has always worked great for me, and has been my favorite version in years. I'll trust from what I've heard that 7.02 is equally stable, it has not crashed except for one time when it wouldn't shut down and I had to force quit.

7.1 seems to be a different beast indeed. It seems both robust and fragile- it crashes nearly every time I use it, but I can sometimes play around for an hour before it does so. In my end-of-year anti-tax shopping spree I picked up Stylus RMX and Trilian, which are fairly processor heavy, so might have introduced some instability to my system as I explore these programs as well.

It's been valuable to find out that 7.1 seems to need some time to re-process files etc. when it encounters a new tune. So I'm trying to be patient while it sorts the data. My crashes seem to occur when I ask DP to load a VI, or when I quickly do a couple tasks in succession, for example one time when simply trying to open my Drumcore window.

I have been able to successfully play tracks with Trilian, Drumcore, Ivory, Miroslav, and Amplitube all cranking away merrily, but then will get a crash when I simply hit rewind to the beginning while playing back.

I had a driver issue as well and MOTU tech answered the phone on the second try and has been helpful, solving that issue in short order; I submitted a typical crash log for 7.1 as long as I had their attention.

I've been enjoying the new features and have learned to save early and often. Hope we can work together to provide info for tweaks that may be necessary to fine tune this release. If I needed to get some serious work done I would certainly use 7.02, but I like the insert chains in 7.1 and would love to get it working on my machine. Want to find what the conflict is and if it's solvable on my end without having to wait for an update.

Tobor

I'm sorry so many of us are having these issues when I am just powering along every day with 7.1. It's not even that I have a clean new system...
The only (minor) issue I've had has been selection from the tracks overview not working as expected (which I've mentioned in another thread).

I wondered if it could be Tiger (I'm on 10.4.11/intel), but then Phil's having some difficulty and he's on Snow at 10.6.2.

Tobor