Audio dropouts when bouncing using PLAY 6

[tunefool]

Help! When I bounce to disk (importing audio to the sequence) using an instrument in PLAY, I get lots of audio dropouts. The only solution seems to be to change the settings of the PLAY instruments so that they play from RAM rather than streaming from disk. But this solution is completely unwieldy, as it uses up a ton of memory (PLAY gives me warning messages about the memory requirements). Plus, it's completely cumbersome to manually change each instrument when I have dozens or more of tracks. (PLAY seems to default to "Stream from disk" for each instrument. )

This problem first appeared in PLAY 5, which I stupidly upgraded to in the middle of a project. The problem of audio dropouts cost me hours of time. I naively assumed it would be fixed in PLAY 6, which I upgraded to yesterday. Turns out, it is not.

I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this problem.

Here's my setup: DP 9.52 connected to a PC via VE Pro 6.0.17011 which hosts PLAY 6.0.4

Would really appreciate any solutions or troubleshooting you might want to suggest!

[tunefool]

Is there really no one else having this problem?

I put in a support request with EastWest, and they did their best to troubleshoot. But ultimately, they could not find a solution within PLAY 6. The only way to avoid audio dropouts in a bounce is to do a real-time mix down instead of an off-line bounce. This is much more time consuming than I would like. So I'm probably going to go back to PLAY 4. Not too happy about having to do that either.

[KenNickels]

I wish I could help. VE Pro is only something I once considered to solve my own drop out problems. But over time I've tamed them without the added complexity. I remember years ago bouncing Play MIDI instruments to audio and had similar problems. Play 4 I think. I always always do it in real time. No problems with Play 5.

One thing I have noticed is that when you load a project with Play instruments in one shot, like the startup of a project, DP handles it quite well. But if you load one instrument out for another, mid-project, the wiper gets sticky and jumpy and things start to deteriorate - editing, playback, bouncing, etc. When this happens I save the project, close it and re-open it. Back to normal. This is predictable every time on my system. Maybe you can apply this troubleshooting to yours with VE Pro.

[Helen]

One thing I have noticed is that when you load a project with Play instruments in one shot, like the startup of a project, DP handles it quite well. But if you load one instrument out for another, mid-project, the wiper gets sticky and jumpy and things start to deteriorate - editing, playback, bouncing, etc. When this happens I save the project, close it and re-open it. Back to normal. This is predictable every time on my system. Maybe you can apply this troubleshooting to yours with VE Pro.

Ken, thanks for posting that! I will try it, and see how it works on my setup.

-Helen