Avid, please OPEN UP YOUR LOGS!

[darbyclash34]

Please please please Avid, don't encrypt your crash reports. I get that only you guys truly have the ability to analyze each line, what modules they are talking about, etc. but for those of us familiar with reading this type of log, just being able to look for repeated patterns would be of huge help.

I can only think of two reasons to do this, protecting trade secrets and forcing us to use your support service. If the issue is protecting your IP, then surely there must be a way to generate a log for you that's sent once it's been generated that contains that data, and one without that the end user can look at. I mean, hell, I can read Apples logs, and lord knows there's a company obsessed with secrecy. And if it's a play for money from support contact, that's just sad. You have to realize that those of us who are going to actually read through all these logs are the exact same people who are never going to use your support. In the 10+ years of using Pro Tools, I have contacted support exactly one time, when I bought 10 and it wouldn't accept my activation code, so I had to be issued a new one. So literally something that was on Avids end and there was no way I could have done anything about it. So the dollar loss from decrypting your crash reports has got to be absolutely minuscule.

In Studio One, any crash related to a plugin shows the plugin at fault in the crash report. In Pro Tools, I need to dump all my 3rd Party plugs in the unused folder, and then manually add them back until I happen on the offending one. That's crazy. We already have to jump through enough hoops to arrive a stable system, there is no excuse for making it harder for the user to resolve issues with your product. So please, just decrypt your crash logs!!

[dankin]

i agree.

[jesele]

+1

[Meads]

+1

[Jon_Atkinson]

I totally agree.

[EdwardG]

+1
you are totally right.

Actually if you think about it, it would be better for AVID also...
because if people find the culprit they wont barge as how bad protools is running,
they would just go and eliminate that plugin and be done with the problem or maybe
in its way to the plugin developer to make them notice the glitch... or both...

So I think it would be a win win

[john1192]

fully agreed ... make it easier for both sides .. less phone support calls .. faster to get back up and running ..

pro tools without any 3 rd party anything runs fine .. add in a little salt and pepper and that bland hospital food known as pro tools goes into Grand Mal Seizure !!!!

unfair in my opinion that we need to put up with this every time there is an Update !!!

open up your logs .. how about make your S _ _ T work ..

[darbyclash34]

Well, obviously ideally it'd be great if we never needed to look at these logs, but I figured taking the encryption off of them was a simpler engineering task for now :) baby steps brother....

On the topic of 3rd party plugs, can anyone, preferably Avid, shed any light as to WHY a 3rd party plug that's not even used in the session can result in instability? What's loading when Pro Tools starts that can cause that behavior? I've never looked at my RAM usage when I load Pro Tools with and without 3rd party plugs, but I'm suspecting the more plugins installed, the higher the ram usage is. If 3rd party plugins are the culprit in so many peoples issues, doesn't it seem that something should be changed to try and address the problem? Either not loading anything until you actually use the plug, or some type of sandboxing for the plugin processes? What are the benefits of the current implementation?

Seeing as only Avid can give educated answers to these type of questions, them being willing to at least acknowledge that they've been asked would really go a long way to getting back some customer good will. I honestly thought they were at their best when they released 10, and gave a roadmap for 11 and the future. But currently we're in the dark about a product that not only costs a fair amount, but many of us have literally years invested in learning. A lot of recent behaviors have made many of us doubt for the future, and while they appear to be starting to turnaround with the release of 12.3 and 12.4, open communication is needed to restore the company's and products reputation. So many questions go completely unanswered, if there's another route then let me know. For instance, I asked a long time ago about how the dual buffering system works, or doesn't as appears to be the situation. I have noticed literally zero benefit to this advertised feature. As I understand the way it should work, if I'm not recording anything, it should be using a large buffer, and if I put something into record enable that track will use the buffer size set for your hardware. If this is the case, then adjusting your buffer while mixing should have no effect on CPU usage, or at least a far smaller one than before this feature was out there. In my experience, and I've tried coming up with scenarios where it should work, I cannot find any behavior to indicate this feature works as advertised. It certainly hasn't done what the product page describes, where suddenly I can do a last minute overdub on a mostly mixed sessions with low latency and only have the CPU hit of having one track processing at that buffer. So I asked repeatedly for any way to observe this behavior work as they describe, and got silence. As far as I can tell and Avid is willing to say, this feature doesn't actually exist. Please please feel free to correct me, I'd love to figure out why I'm not seeing any benefit from this.

Sorry for rambling, in summation, Avid please have a better dialog with your users, including giving us the tools to figure out why your product is crashing! As stated above, you'll probably wind up with fewer people complaining about Pro Tools if they could see that it was 3rd party stuff at fault!

[john1192]

if you remove that 3rd party plugin do all your issues go away ??

[darbyclash34]

For people who are having issues caused by 3rd party plugins, yes, moving the plugin file to the Plug-ins (Unused) folder with resolve the issue. The difficulty lies in determining WHICH plugin is the culprit. I have found from many other application logs that they can point you to a faulty plugin or extension very quickly. Diagnosing Safari crashes is a great example. If flash player brought the browser down, the log will tell you that very directly. So it seems reasonable to think that the Pro Tools crash reports probably contain some indication as to WHY IT CRASHED. God it's so frustrating.

For that matter, across the board it's kind of crazy that we still really haven't evolved all that much in terms of software being helpful to the user in terms of what to do when an error occurs. An example, iTunes has a huge number of different possible restore errors for iOS, and there is a support document that tells you what steps to talk for each one. Why doesn't iTunes just show me that information and cut out the middle man? I get that error codes were a good way to save space when every kilobyte of storage was precious, but unless someone can explain to me otherwise, it doesn't seem to make sense that we're still using them. I think, particularly for professional applications where resolving issues quickly can be the difference between having a job and not, that there needs to be similar considerations given to the support systems as is given to making the program easy to use. Just a thought.