MOTUnation.com

A nightmare that's happened before is happening again. I'm DP8.02, running VEPro 5 using Kontakt and Omnisphere in a V-Rack. Right now about 20 MIDI instruments, about 15 mono and 12 stereo audio tracks.

Sometimes during a long involved audio session, if I haven't printed the instrumental audio tracks yet, sometimes my MIDI playback will go on strike. It goes mostly silent, except for occasional squeaks and squawks from instruments that seem now to be mis-assigned. I usually give up and revert to an earlier document in that case.

Right now is a bit more hopeful -- all the MIDI instruments are responding correctly when I play keys on my controller, but when I press Play or Record, silence both from my recorded MIDI info and from my controller.

I'm fairly sure this time it may not be a freakout, and instead I'm doing something wrong with my monitoring or my buses. I do remember that monitoring has to be on to hear the MIDI data play back instead of the recorded track, but I've checked my routing and this signal path ordinarily works. Can a bus or an I/O go bad? Thanks in advance for all advice.

2012 MBPro 2.6GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB memory, 750Gb SSD, 2 external LaCie SSDs, DP8.02, Kontakt 5, Omnisphere 1.5

I've really no experience when it comes to VIs, but with audio, even if playback works, one has to turn on the little blue (default theme - not sure how theme selection may affect this) buttons in the TO, Mixer or perhaps Sequence (not sure about this one) windows on a per-channel basis in order to hear input.

Even 'though it's technically output you're referring to as one can't "hear" MIDI data in DP, if you haven't activated these buttons it might be worth a shot.

I realise this is basic stuff and I hope you don't think I'm patronising you with this suggestion; it's all I've got, unfortunately, and as I like to say, a whole lot of nothing is sometimes better than a little something.

Thanks very much for the suggestion. However, I do spend lots of time turning the little blue icons on or off for recording or playback, and so a missing link in the signal path is something I look for first. I have sometimes been able to get things back up and running that way. But this problem feels like a bug, something lying in wait until I do too much complicated stuff and overwhelm the system.

The main symptom is silence, with an occasional weird exception, like a single MIDI track sounding one long note that has to be turned off with apple-1; or one or more tracks playing a few of the notes I recorded here or there. The tracks that make these noises are play-enabled and monitoring-enabled (or muted) just as correctly as the ones that are silent.

Ah well. It's a good thing I Save As obsessively now.

Update: Trying to track down the cause.

I opened an earlier version of the project that seemed fine. Playback was fine; double-checked that it was MIDI playing and not the recorded audio tracks. Checked the various instruments out on my controller. They play fine.

Then I record-enabled a MIDI track and hit record. Silence. Permanent silence.

I stop recording, then just rewind and press Play. Silence. None of the sequence's recorded MIDI notes will sound, but the audio soundbites play back fine.

And I can still play my Kontakt MIDI through my controller, but the MIDI data I've recorded is silent. I press option-space to audition a track; nothing.

Even when I select an audio soundbite and press option-space: silence. BUT when I double click a soundbite and highlight a section of audio, it *does* sound as it's supposed to.

What have I done that hitting Record makes my sequence go on strike but not my instruments?

Update part 2.

So I'm now doublechecking in Tracks Overview, reading the level meters on my MIDI instruments. They seem to be playing fine; they just don't seem to be delivering the sound to the mixer or speakers.

I jump forward to a thick part of the orchestration combining audio and MIDI. The audio plays fine, but the 20+ MIDI instruments are silent, except for a single French horn note, sounding low. And it won't stop sounding. I hunt down the French horn, identify the note, play it to stop the sound.

Rewinding to the top, I hit Play again. Suddenly everything plays fine as though the bug never happened.

Okay. I try to record something again. Bug kicks in again. Silence. Controller triggers VEPro 5 instruments (using mostly Kontakt and Omnisphere) just fine. But the MIDI tracks once again won't sound.

So at least this seems strongly like a bug, and I'm not routing things particularly wrong.

I'm in DP8.02. Would updating to 8.07 help? I'm not yet ready for 9.

Is there some button I'm accidentally hitting? Or is this a corrupt file?

Final observation:

I notice that when sequence is not playing or recording, I can record-enable any of my MIDI instruments (usually a Kontakt patch housed within Vienna Ensemble Pro 5) and play it on my controller, and it sounds fine.

But when I play notes on my controller, it doesn't show up on the meter. Conversely, when I try playback of the MIDI notes I've already recorded, I hear silence, but I can see activity in the meter of that very same track.

I can get sound but no meter; or meter but no sound. Oy.