MOTUnation.com

MOTU, here are some things I'd have caught for you, if I were beta testing DP8.
Seriously, these are pretty basic, which surprises me for MOTU, whose reputation with DP is amazingly high.

1. Keyboard commands sometimes quit working. COMMAND-A (select all) will often not work. COMMAND-OPTION-A (select all tracks for current range) will usually work when COMMAND-A does not. But that doesn't help much when you want to select all. Workaround: restart DP

2. W and T - quick groups - sometimes fail to work. Like COMMAND-A, sometimes these keys also have no effect. Workaround: restart DP

3. Sometimes items 1 & 2 are not a problem, but leave DP open in the background for a while, and they may quit working later on. Workaround: restart DP

4. SHIFT-L (Open Commands Window) It opens the window, but it will not place the cursor in the field the way it always has in DP. We have to put it there. Attempts to Tab in or to use Command F or Command S to get the cursor in the field result in failure. Workaround: use mouse to put the cursor in the field and click. This is required 100% of the time. We've gone back 20 years in time!

5. COMMAND-W will not close Panel Windows. I'm talking about windows like the Commands Window, Bundles Window, Groups Window, Preferences and so forth. These have always responded to Command-W. What happened? And to make matters worse, every time you click Command-W, it closes a window that's opened somewhere else. It may be in the background, behind other windows, or it may be in another Space, but it closes a window without your knowledge of it.

6. Scrolling has become erratic. I'm using a 2012 Mac Pro with 12 cores! This is one of the latest and greatest Macs ever made, and scrolling -- which used to be smooth as silk -- as become erratic and jerky as if it were 1999 with 60 tracks with plugins and automation. Vertical scrolling is worse than horizontal scrolling.

7. Tools panel will not open full size. I have every tool checked in the Tools Preference, but it always cuts off the last two. I have to open it all the way via dragging by hand.

8.Losing keyboard focus: I was trying to edit Automation Control Points. I selected the points, then hit Delete. Nothing happened. I tried dozens of times and used every trick I could think of to get the keyboard focus working, but it failed. (other apps had no problem. Everything worked same as always, but switch back to DP, and the keyboard still could not delete the points. IMPORTANT: Thinking that it's just a loss of connection with the keyboard, I tried to delete with the mouse, using the Edit Menu. All the commands were grayed out, except for Copy, Copy to Clipping Window, and Paste. There was no way to select Cut or Erase, not to mention all the other options in that menu.

Whatever is causing this loss of connection with the keyboard is also causing loss of access to the commands themselves, even in the menus.
Workaround: Reboot DP.

9. Shortcuts Panel: Upon opening an existing file which was saved with the Shortcuts Panel open, the panel does open, but not large enough to display any shortcuts. I have to resize it manually to make them visible.

This is very basic stuff. Stuff the likes of which I haven't seen in DP in… well… at least since DP 4.0, and really, not ever. I have no doubt that you will fix all these things. They simply are not representative of the product quality that MOTU is known for. I just find it odd that it got out of MOTU's shop this way. I'm sure the list will grow as we each add more problems we find, though I really hope it doesn't grow MUCH larger!

Thanks,

Shooshie

OS X Lion (10.7.5),
DP8,
Mac Pro (2.4 GHz 6 core Intel Xeon x 2)
12 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

In retrospect, about 6 of those 9 points all come back to the same thing: losing keyboard focus. I'm realizing that when one of those happens, the rest happen. It's a problem with keyboard/menu focus, and it may happen upon first opening DP, or it may happen after it's sat open for a while, but it always leads to a rebooting of DP.

Shooshie

Wow. I haven't installed 8 yet. Maybe I'll wait until 8.01 is available and then apply that upgrade.

Buzzy

Well, I have to be honest, Buzzy; as much as I love DP8 -- and I DO think it's great -- this keyboard focus thing is highly annoying. Because it's intermittent, it may be hard to track down what's happening. I don't know if it happens after a certain amount of idle time has passed, or if it requires a trigger, such as opening Safari, or input from an iPad… there are so many possibilities. That's why it's going to take MOTU to figure it out. I can't make it happen, not knowing the trigger, but I can say for sure that given long enough, it will eventually happen 100% of the time on my system. That's another variable. It may happen only on certain Macs or with certain systems.

So, yeah, if you don't want to be a Post-Beta Tester, you might wait for the next update. If you've already installed DP8, just be ready to restart it from time to time if this happens. I am thinking it's not happening to everyone, or we'd have seen more reports by now. Also, if idle time is the trigger, it may not happen at all to someone who is working continually. I've noticed that it often happens when I've been over here at the forum reporting on it or replying to others' posts. Go back to it, and it's lost keyboard focus.

I hope they figure it out soon.

Shooshie

"if it requires a trigger, such as opening Safari, or input from an iPad"

Happened to us without anything but DP involved, and macs are not online for normal workflow.

I have had this problem on occasion in DP7 on my G5 PPC. The solution has been simple: Click the desktop somewhere DP isn't to move focus to the Finder. Then click on the DP icon in the Dock. And we're back in business.

Give it a try and let us know...

HCMarkus wrote:I have had this problem on occasion in DP7 on my G5 PPC. The solution has been simple: Click the desktop somewhere DP isn't to move focus to the Finder. Then click on the DP icon in the Dock. And we're back in business.

Give it a try and let us know...

I can confirm this (on my MacPro 10.6.8 ) though it's so infrequent in DP7 that I've never given it much thought. I do the same thing as HC, click on the finder then back to DP. Usually, almost always, most of the times works. Perhaps this is a long time problem that has been exacerbated in DP8 by something.

Phil

BTW, I just noticed something. When I tried to put 10.6.8 in parenthesis, I got a smiley: (10.6. I had to put a space after the 8 to get it to look right. So I guess if you put DP8 in parenthesis:
(DP8)
Things that make you go Hmmm.

I'm still theta testing...

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I'm still theta testing...

No doubt.

FYI - theta is the 8th letter if the Greek alphabet. It was a pun.

Just run in DP 7 when necessary, 7 is working great in my system for older projects. And keep waves 8 around , which can be switched if needed.

I can confirm the slow scrolling in DP8. It's a bit jerky. I'm confident
MOTU will address this in the next update, just as they did the missing
soundbites and slow waveform-redraw issues with DP7.0.

Honestly, the thing I wanted most in DP8 was the new plug-ins, and since they
can be accessed in DP7 once you install and launch 8, that's mission accomplished, and I can stay in 7.24 for the time being.

HCMarkus wrote:I have had this problem on occasion in DP7 on my G5 PPC. The solution has been simple: Click the desktop somewhere DP isn't to move focus to the Finder. Then click on the DP icon in the Dock. And we're back in business.

Give it a try and let us know...

I've just had the chance to test that, and it does not work on my setup. I'm thinking this may be a different problem than the one you are referring to. I remember something like that back in previous versions, and while I can't recall the particulars, it did some severe stuff. Turns out, that was an Apple thing. Adobe even put out a little "fixit" app that ran a script that reset whatever it was that went out of whack.

But this is different. Strangely, it doesn't always affect the key commands in the same way. Sometimes NO commands work. Right now, I can't select all (Command-A), but I can deselect, (Command-D). I can't use the W or T keys to quick-group, but I can use Option to "Select Only" or Command to "Select Everything Except." Command W won't close windows, but Shift-L, Shift-G, Shift-T, etc. will open them.

At other times, even those commands will fail. Incidentally, this time it happened upon starting DP.

Shooshie

10. Command-W: This just now caused DP to attempt to quit. It brought up the dialog box "Do you want to save your work before quitting? (There are 14 windows open, so it's not like it's on the last window.) And it gives you the option to save, cancel, or not to save. This happened on each of the free-standing windows. When I went back to the Consolidated Window, it closed windows in other Spaces, (I spread my windows out over 3 to 5 spaces) and then it no longer brought up the Quit dialog, even in other windows.

When it happened, it did the same thing on any free-standing window. Now that it's not happening, the other odd behavior has resumed, where Command-W will not close free-standing panel style windows (Commands Window, Bundles, Legend) which have the thin title bar, but closes other regular windows (Mixing Board, Graphic Editor) in the background.

Shooshie

As posted earlier in another thread, I don't use consolidated windows and don't like them, but with the new rewrite, I thought I'd give it a try. Eh... no so much, but when I went to go back to disabling consolidated windows, ALL my windows disappeared and would not come back. Not after closing the project, DP, or even after rebooting the Mac. What brought them back was changing the pref to enable consolidated windows. Then disabling it again, the windows were back to normal. Really odd...

During the brain drain from DP8, key commands for windows blinked something, but nothing appeared and the window item in the menus were visible and appeared active, but brought no window up when clicked. The only window to remain was the transport window, which did work, and which did playback. I believe I could even change chunks from there and have them playback, but no windows AT ALL.