HD9 serious issues

[GSG]

Hi,

System: 2011 Mac Pro, PT9.0.2, HD3, 3 x Avid HD I/Os / 2011 Mac Pro, PT9.0.2, HD2, 2 x Avid I/Os

I'm running Pro Tools 9 on two separate, very standardised machines. I've been having serious problems with the playing back of certain tracks upon re-visiting a session. When I open a session, certain tracks will refuse to playback, although they may begin to playback in place of other tracks if I happen to disable them. Sometimes disabling a plugin that should have no relevance to the problem track will cause it to being playing back.

To describe the scene, the transport plays, the session runs fine, but certain tracks, with active, perfectly good audio on them do not play - the meters don't do anything, and no audio comes out. This is with or without plugins in the session, and either straight out a hardware output, or through a buss.

Sometimes re-opening the session fixes the problem, but sometimes not. Sometimes the session will reopen, but different tracks will be refusing the play back. Deleting, then rebuilding the I/O page doesn't help. Routing out of different channels doesn't make a consistent difference (although sometimes a track might spark into life as a result).

There is nothing consistent about the way this happens - and it's happened from very early on in the systems life - both systems. It's like the sessions have become corrupted, but they have literally been completely untouched in the intervening few days - how could this have happened?!! Surely impossible, especially since it's happened to probably 20% of all the work we've carried out so far, on sessions originating on both computers. To make that clear, these are sessions that have been created from scratch on out machines, on internal hard drives, which have preformed faultlessly throughout the recording sessions, and then don't work properly when opened a week or two later.

This has yet to [bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep] me over in front of a client, or in a high pressure situation, but it will, and it'll be an absolute disaster when it does because there's no reliable, set way of solving it.


Surely someone's having this exact problem, because there's nothing odd about the computers I'm running, and I'm running the latest versions of all the plugins (including ones I'm not using in the sessions).



Thanks for you time

C

[Marsdy]

Hope this answer isn't too obvious!!!

On the face of it, could you be running out of voices? Have you assigned enough for the sessions in question? (Check in the System Usage window.)

[GSG]

I actually was planning to mention this in the original post - definately not the issue. Changing the amount of DSP allocated to the mix engine makes no difference (which in my mind is strange, as I'd imagine unloading, then reloading the mix engine would fix any routing problems...), and there's definitely enough voices - like I said, these are sessions that were running flawlessly before, on the same computer.

[Micks_Mix]

I know this problem very well. DTS would say: Are all plugins up to date? And I think they're right. Even if all plugins are up to date, one of them could cause these problems due to a (maybe unknown) software defect. So the best way to start is: check your versions and/or remove the plugins that you don't need for the moment. To reveil the culprit, the fastest way would be to remove 50% of the plugins and check whether your system is stable now. If not, go ahead with the next 50% and so on. As soon as PT works reliably, you can be pretty sure, that the faulty plugin is among the ones you lastly removed. Then try it with moving back 50% of those. Unfortunately this can take some time, if the problem is not 100% reproducible.

[DigiTechSupt]

Do you have ReVibe or Smack in your session? Does removing them resolve the issue?

(Obviously not a good workaround - I'm just gathering info to see if it's the case on your system as we have a couple reports of this and are trying to find a commonality...)

[Micks_Mix]

I am using ReVibe in most of my sessions. I will try to remove it next time I encounter the problem. At the moment my system works reliably. I recently updated my Komplete 7 to Komplete 8. It's possible that an NI plugin/VI was the problem in my case.

[GSG]

I guess I'll start filtering through the plugins - there's nothing particularly exotic about what I'm running - Sonnox Oxford bundle, Altiverb, Autotune, and Serato have been the only consistent plugins throughout this problem time.

Any other recommendations would be gratefully received.

[DigiTechSupt]

I would definitely make sure you have the minimum version listed in our plugin compatibility grid for any installed plug-ins. Incompatible/outdated plugins can cause all kinds of strange problems to occur.

Which versions of NI plugins did you have installed previously?

[Micks_Mix]

NI Komplete 7 (always the latest updates).