AU softsynths gone AWOL in DP 4.6

[contigoni]

Now suddenly none of my AU synths in 4.6 will open their edit windows.

I just tried every one of them in Numerology and they all will open their edit windows, no prob. Freakin' weird. I have one MAS softsynth and it opens, and I have a few VST VIs using VSTWrapper, and they open. But not one single AU VI I own will open.

I've already trashed everything related to DP and reinstalled it from 4.5 up. Then I reinstalled a lot of the synths that wouldn't show up. That did nothing.

Anybody have any ideas (Besides that "Oh boy here we go" thread)?

[BKK-OZ]

First reccomendation, use the search engine on Unicornation. Second, use the support search engine @ MOTU.com. Third, scroll down a tad and read this thread: on examining AU's.

[contigoni]

Originally posted by BKK-OZ:
First reccomendation, use the search engine on Unicornation.]

I did. No one had reported anything remotely similar to what I'm experiencing.

Second, use the support search engine @ MOTU.com.

I did. Ditto.

Third, scroll down a tad and read this thread: on examining AU's.

I read that before posting. (See reply to "First recommendation," above.)

So now that we've done all that, do you have any recommendations that have any relevance to what I posted?

[sdfalk]

Do you have your outputs set to your audio card?
I never use the internal sound on my mac but for whatever reason
Dp defaulted to the internal sound anyway.
So it was outputting to nothing and I wouldn't be able to get an AU
to show up until I changed the output to the active output of my audio card.

<small>[ August 06, 2005, 09:06 PM: Message edited by: sdfalk ]</small>

[Shooshie]

Question: When you double click to open a synth edit window, does ANYTHING happen at all? Do you get a header to a window that opens without the window?

I'm having the same problem with plugins. When I double-click on the plugin in the Mixing Board, the window will not open. Instead, it opens the header to a plugin window from a different chunk, but without the body of the window. Then occasionally it will open the wrong plugin, in the wrong track, from the wrong chunk! Something very corrupted here.

I think we are seeing manifestations of the same bug, but in several different areas. You're seeing it in the AU Synth edit windows. I'm seeing it in Plugin windows. Bennals is seeing it in aux and instrument tracks. Croyal is having a problem similar to mine regarding chunks and mixing board layouts. They all seem related to internal file management. (possibly) Also, the Aggregate Device may be involved. Rewiring of ports?

And they all result in pandemonium that is not cured by reinstalling, loading into a fresh file, and the usual methods. For the record, I had recently changed from hardware interfaces to Aggregate Devices at the core audio level. That's a little like rewiring the ports. Bennals is using Rewire. You are using a VST wrapper. Croyal is using Aggregate Device. Is there a common thread anywhere in this?

I think we all need to report this to MOTU immediately.

Shooshie

<small>[ August 06, 2005, 10:54 PM: Message edited by: Shooshie ]</small>

[al carmichael]

I had this problem in 4.6 with BFD. Double clicking on the icon in the mixing board effect insert labeled BFD gave me only the header.

However, when I open a file created in 4.5 that has BFD already in use, I can open the whole edit window for BFD in 4.6. Weird.

[qo]

sdfalk is right that a plugin window will open only with the window header if no output (or an output that no longer exists) is chosen. This can happen if you've changed things in Audio Bundles and haven't updated your tracks to reflect the new outputs.

But, I've seen this problem intermittently even with a valid output. Usually, quitting DP and loading again fixes it.

[Shooshie]

Originally posted by qo:
sdfalk is right that a plugin window will open only with the window header if no output (or an output that no longer exists) is chosen. This can happen if you've changed things in Audio Bundles and haven't updated your tracks to reflect the new outputs.

But, I've seen this problem intermittently even with a valid output. Usually, quitting DP and loading again fixes it.

It may be that ALL CHUNKS have to be updated. Since the problems that some of us are having are crossing chunk barriers, that would suggest a file-wide update as a necessity. I'll try that tomorrow. I was only updating chunks as I used them. With all the experimenting I was doing, it would have been impractical to change everything every time I tried a new configuration in the Aggregate Device/Hardware window.

This gives me a little hope, though it may be too late for files that are already corrupted.

Shooshie

[contigoni]

Originally posted by sdfalk:
Do you have your outputs set to your audio card?

I think you (and Shooshie, below) may be onto something. I haven't had time to thoroughly go back and recall, or test currently, but I think the problems may be related to my reading and following the advice on creating an aggregate device in Audio-MIDI Setup.

I'm a bit confused because I had it set up, then deleted it, then set it up again, and I was in and out of DP at various times during those phases and have the impression that it continued even when I had deleted the aggreagate device.

Then again the track routings may have been wrong anyway. (Man, it can all get confusing real fast without a lab assistant in a white smock to record your every move on a clipboard. Maybe that's what I need. One with garters would be good.)

I explore this more in response to Shooshie's questions further down. (The problems, not the lab assistant.)

[contigoni]

Originally posted by Shooshie:
Question: When you double click to open a synth edit window, does ANYTHING happen at all? Do you get a header to a window that opens without the window?

Exactalactly. Just that little DP doo-diddly snippet with the three radio buttons and three dropdown menus, but no GUI.

I had recently changed from hardware interfaces to Aggregate Devices at the core audio level. That's a little like rewiring the ports. Bennals is using Rewire. You are using a VST wrapper. Croyal is using Aggregate Device. Is there a common thread anywhere in this?

As I posted above, I now think my troubles are time-consistent with my setting up an Aggregate Device, as I sort of sketched out in my message above.

My situation is having a full-duplex USB interface that has always shown as two different units in configuring the audio devices (one for input and one for output apparently). I noticed that after I set up the Aggregate Device and selected it in DP, the Opt-A command to route the audio for a group of tracks was very flaky. Some it would, some it wouldn't. I did each manually, but I still had the GUIs of the AU instruments not report for duty, IIRC.

And I think the problem continued after I deleted the Aggregate Device and went back to just using my interface, but I was so frustrated at that point I may have been sloppy about reassigning the audio routings. I have to do some serious testing at this point with these clues.

I think we all need to report this to MOTU immediately.

I couldn't agree more. This kind of thing shouldn't happen without there being any indication of what's causing the problem. Off to do some tests.

P.S. Apologies to BKK-OZ re the search thing. From what's been posted on this now it looks like others have reported similar problems, but they didn't turn up in any of my several searches. People use different nomenclature to describe some of these things so sometimes it's hard to know what to search for.

[contigoni]

Originally posted by qo:
sdfalk is right that a plugin window will open only with the window header if no output (or an output that no longer exists) is chosen. This can happen if you've changed things in Audio Bundles and haven't updated your tracks to reflect the new outputs.

But, I've seen this problem intermittently even with a valid output. Usually, quitting DP and loading again fixes it.

Thanks qo. With these clues I'm going to clean house and try to get the things showing back up in DP. With Numerology as my only "control" application to compare to, and working fine even with an Aggregate Device created in A-M Setup, this seems on the surface to be a DP issue. (Although GarageBand is crashing on startup now. Is it an Apple issue? A combination? How is Numerology so smart? Maybe I'll just take up the accordion and forget about it.)

[Shooshie]

Originally posted by contigoni:
Maybe I'll just take up the accordion and forget about it.)

Guaranteed fix. I think I'll go back to sax and piano. Although I have to say, the frustration of this has me ready to rain violins on MOTU and/or Apple.

Shooshie

<small>[ August 07, 2005, 09:49 AM: Message edited by: Shooshie ]</small>

[contigoni]

New thought:

Given that, in my case, this anomaly:

A) happens only with AUs (instruments I know, haven't checked effects yet) and

B) happens even when creating a new instrument track in a brand new file in DP after having configured audio device to Aggregate Device,

MOTU has some serious work to do. No matter what, DP should be honoring the selected audio device for creating a new AU VI track in a brand new created file, right?

[Shooshie]

Originally posted by contigoni:
New thought:

Given that, in my case, this anomaly:

A) happens only with AUs (instruments I know, haven't checked effects yet) and

B) happens even when creating a new instrument track in a brand new file in DP after having configured audio device to Aggregate Device,

MOTU has some serious work to do. No matter what, DP should be honoring the selected audio device for creating a new AU VI track in a brand new created file, right?

Agreed. I find it interesting that an old file from 5 years ago, with 40 tracks or more, 18 busses, and dozens of plugins, played greate under the new AD configuration. Geez... I hope I didn't save that!

Shooshie

[qo]

Hi guys,

I'm certain that this was happening in my setup before AgDevs entered the picture. But, you guys may have a point anyway. On my Apogee DA-16X channels 1-2 don't work due to an incompatibility with CoreAudio which I brought to Apogee's attention a couple months ago. The problem is in the numbers of the ins-outs on these interfaces:

AD-16X - ins 1-16, outs 1-2
DA-16X - ins 1-2, outs 1-16

AD-16X outs 1-2 conflict with DA-16X outs 1-2.

So, if I choose DA-16X outs 1-2 for an Instrument Track, the VI window header appears, but the VI does not.

Perhaps the same thing is happening in your setups, but for other interface numbers, and for more interfaces. Go into Audio/MIDI Setup and look at the ins and outs for each device. Write them all down in a way that you can compare their CoreAudio numbering. If the numbering on the outputs overlap, and you're using these overlapping interfaces for your Instrument Track outputs, then try changing to a non-overlapping output pair.

This is just a wild guess. I'd find it hard to believe that Apple wouldn't either remap the interface numbers somehow, or assign a unique ID to each interface and tie that interface's port list to this ID. That is, if you have two 8-channel AD/DA boxes (like two 896HD), do you see something like:

896-1 ins 1-8 outs 1-8
896-2 ins 1-8 outs 1-8

Or do you see

896-1 ins 1-8 outs 1-8
896-2 ins 9-16 outs 9-16

(yeah, I know the 896 has more than 8 ins/outs, but this is just for illustrative purposes).

If you see the first example, then hopefully Apple ties a unique ID to each interface and includes that in it's "handle" for the interface's ports e.g. 896-1 is unique from 896-2, and so port pair 896-1(1-2) is unique from 896-2(1-2). But, if this is the case, maybe DP doesn't take into account the unique "handle" and only considers the port numbers?

Anyway, perhaps it's worth trying non-overlapping interfaces, if you have them. I could be totally off-base with this. If so, a big OOPS in advance