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Never seen or heard an audio dropout like this before

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 2:12 am
by Stuartfox
This is probably one of those strange one-offs that will never happen again (I hope) but I was bouncing in real-time, all my VI's in local instances of Vienna Ensemble Pro and the audio being routed out of my RME ff800 and back onto a stereo track in DP.

The audio stopped - but the stereo track was still recording something, I could see the waveform being created, also the VI's were still doing their thing, GUI's moving, VU meters going.... they were definately still working as they should have been....

Anyway when I checked the resulting audio bounce, this is what happened.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2502628/odd_cutout.mp3

When the audio starts going strange - this is when my monitors went silent, I didn't hear anything while the glitchy part was being recorded. And when the audio popped back on, everything was in time and perfect, as you can hear. Other dropouts that have involved timing or freezing of a VI have resulted in everything being out of time when the audio comes back in.

Just thought I'd post this to see if anyone had any rays of light to shine on it.

S
Still with DP7 btw.

Re: Never seen or heard an audio dropout like this before

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 1:19 pm
by Shooshie
It sounds like one of your VIs had been inactive for a while, and its hard drive went to sleep. That would have been the moment that it tried to spin up. If it's not that, you should send it to MOTU.

If it IS the hard drive, you should go to the Energy Saver System Preference and uncheck the option "put hard drives to sleep when possible."

Shoosh

Re: Never seen or heard an audio dropout like this before

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 3:39 pm
by labman
I have heard same thing that once a year maybe in 7.2x. We did mac reboots and all was well. Never figured it out.

Re: Never seen or heard an audio dropout like this before

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 4:03 pm
by MIDI Life Crisis
Sounds more like a digital feedback loop to me. A leak?

Re: Never seen or heard an audio dropout like this before

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 5:15 pm
by Stuartfox
I found out what triggered this intermittent problem, its happened once in every 5 - 6 hours of working, and it just happened with a stand alone instance of quick time player so I now know its not a DP Issue... It only started happening when I plugged a second Firewire800 device into my mac pro (the first being my fireface800).

The WD Mystudio Hard drive was not even plugged in at the mains, but plugging it in caused the issues - and when I switched the drive on, all audio stopped and came on, stammered for a bit - then was fine.

Hope this isn't a hardware issue - had enough of them...

Seems to be one thing after another these days... bring on DP8 for windows 7 ;-)

SF