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Just a pet peeve of mine and maybe someone can confirm this. I don't know if it started with Snow Leopard or what, but it used to be in MIDI device window of Audio MIDI Setup, I could arrange all the icons of my attached MIDI devices neatly and then quit AMS, and next time I opened AMS they'd look like they did when I quit AMS.

Now, they never remember it and always open up weird... all shoved into one row or something and it looks terrible. Minor thing, but irritating? Is this broken now, or is there a pref or something I should try deleting? Anybody else seeing this?

This has been a problem on PPC's under Tiger since March 2008 or earlier, as I recall (maybe March 2007). I thought I had read that they had fixed it in one of the later Leopard updates.

It seems related to the order and timing of powering down the audio interface, although I've never been able to irrefutably prove this is the case. If you have hard drives daisy-chained to your audio interface, I think turning off the audio interface before the hard drives essentially removes the cached information from AMS.

I find it very annoying, and time-consuming, but it seems that sticking to a specific power-on and power-off device order at least minimizes the cases where AMS either loses its device connection "virtual wires" or garbles its layout, or both.

It also happens sometimes if I get an error in DP -- whether a crash, CPU overload, sample rate changing during a project recording (sometimes by opening another app that doesn't slave its sample rate and which may have last been opened using a different one).

I don't know if any of this will be helpful in the context of MacPro's, later versions of OS X, etc. Maybe it at least gives a couple of avenues for isolating the problem though, and seeing if there's a way to avoid it even if ultimately it is a fault of AMS.

I checked it and mine is fine.
I closed the project reopened it and my adjustments were still there.

MIDI maniac wrote:I checked it and mine is fine.
I closed the project reopened it and my adjustments were still there.

Project? Were talking about the arrangement of MIDI device icons in the MIDI window of the Apple Audio MIDI Setup app, right?

James Steele wrote:J

Now, they never remember it and always open up weird... all shoved into one row or something and it looks terrible. Minor thing, but irritating? Is this broken now, or is there a pref or something I should try deleting? Anybody else seeing this?

AMS (AudioMIDI set) up is a PITA, piece of ka ka!! It doesn't remember your arrangement on the MIDI side, and audio side can only read the 1st bank of MOTU PCI consol. settings. Sure you can use other banks, but AMS needs to be open for your settings to be active......sigh


T

i have had the same exact experience. makes me crazy. after painstakenly arranging my icons for the millionth time and then having them come back all off the screen i gave up and now have adjusted to the problem. open window. scroll to the right, find icon, etc.

total pain.

motu fix it please!

willheim wrote:i have had the same exact experience. makes me crazy. after painstakenly arranging my icons for the millionth time and then having them come back all off the screen i gave up and now have adjusted to the problem. open window. scroll to the right, find icon, etc.

total pain.

motu fix it please!

motu can't fix this. Audio MIDI Setup is part of the OS (you can find it in your Utilities folder) , DP just opens the window for you.

I have the same issues, btw. It never keeps the arrangement of the icons and it drives me nuts.

Mine stay the same. 1 MTP-AV and about 10 modules.

I do power up the interfaces before I start the Mac, and I shutdown the Mac and then turn off the interfaces if that helps.

I'm not on Snow Leopard, yet, for what that's worth.

Buzzy

I'm not sure when this started happening, but I am experiencing the same AMS "all in a row" behavior that James mentioned.

I suspect this is an Apple issue and I'm thinking it happened on a fairly recent SL update.

AMS has always felt kind of clunky to me, and I'm wondering about the reason for this latest change.
The good news is that all my MIDI stuff is working fine and I can deal with the horizontal scrolling in the AMS MIDI window.

Didn't happen on Leopard for me on my G5. But I went straight to Snow Leopard when I got my Mac Pro and that's when it happened. It looks like this is a bug introduced with Snow Leopard.

I seem to recall that there's an alternative to Audio MIDI Setup, either as a freebie or from a commercial vendor. Might be a good time to look into it. I might have read about it in Macworld Magazine. I'll do a Google when I have more energy (long work day).

I'm not using DP, but have the same problem. Audio MIDI Setup looses the setup of my devices - several - I'm using an old serial Timepiece AV networked off a newer USB Timepiece AV. I also notice they removed the ability to upload your own artwork - I've bothered to put pictures of my gear in the set up. But I did finally find the location and was able to add some new ones.

I do wonder if there's some older setup file that needs to be removed... not sure where to look.

-jk

mhschmieder wrote:I seem to recall that there's an alternative to Audio MIDI Setup, either as a freebie or from a commercial vendor. Might be a good time to look into it. I might have read about it in Macworld Magazine. I'll do a Google when I have more energy (long work day).

I have faint memories of something like that. In fact, at some point I thought MOTU had provided us with one in a fairly recent version of DP. I never investigated it, since I've no beefs with Audio/MIDI Setup, other than the aforementioned inability to order my icons as I'd like them.

Because of the seemingly arbitrary ordering of the icons (or maybe it's based on date of creation?) I often get confused about which port my devices are connected to. After all, exploring the backs of my rack gear and tracing their cables or reading their labels is not a daily exercise of mine, so I kind of rely on graphic interfaces to help me there. Oh, sure, it's easy enough to find them out, but the more powerful image is the one I see in Audio/MIDI Setup, which has three of my icons out of order. They will not go where I want them. So, I remember my WX5 as being in MIDI Port 5, when actually it's in Port 7. My Roland FC300 and an old Yamaha SPX90II jockey for position in my mind's eye between ports 6 and 7, when in fact they are in ports 6 and 5. Not that any of this matters to anyone but me, but it just illustrates how Apple could help make all this a little more "Mac-like" by just allowing us to save the graphic representation of our studio in the order we wish to see it.

As for the alternative MIDI setup, I suspect it's a poltergeist haunting a remembered space somewhere between a misunderstood press release and a long-gone YouTube video announcement from NAMM. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong. I could use another diversion tonight to keep me from accomplishing real work.

Shooshie

James Steele wrote:Just a pet peeve of mine and maybe someone can confirm this. I don't know if it started with Snow Leopard or what, but it used to be in MIDI device window of Audio MIDI Setup, I could arrange all the icons of my attached MIDI devices neatly and then quit AMS, and next time I opened AMS they'd look like they did when I quit AMS.

Now, they never remember it and always open up weird... all shoved into one row or something and it looks terrible. Minor thing, but irritating? Is this broken now, or is there a pref or something I should try deleting? Anybody else seeing this?

Same here James. Quite irritating, yes.
But, on the other side, thanks SL, AMS is no more crashing every now and then. It was sort of a nightmare with all previous OSX releases, including Tiger.
Sure, I will try this powering sequence thing, though.

Weird, my AMS setup does not exhibit this problem. I wonder if it's an issue with files that have been carried over from PowerPC to Intel? I think I may have rebuilt my AMS setup from scratch after the transition to Intel.

The actual document files for the AMS setup (i.e. ~/Library/Audio/MIDI Configurations/Whatever.mcfg) are just plist files, which are usually text files full of XML (although it might be stored as binary-plist, although I doubt it). If I open mine in a text editor, I see lots of perfectly-reasonable values for the apple.MIDI.audiomidisetup.widget.xPosition and apple.MIDI.audiomidisetup.widget.yPosition keys, which are the values that AMS uses to display the locations of the icons. It would be interesting to see one of the documents that exhibit this issue, to see if those saved position keys are bad in some way...