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  #11  
Old 08-26-2020, 01:19 AM
loud neighbor loud neighbor is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

Thanks to louisenslinproduce's research I followed the advice at the OWC link to check my PCI Card configuration. I discovered that the "Automatic Bandwidth Configuration" (Finder / About This Mac / PCI Cards / Expansion Slot Utility) was creating a condition where "Pool B" was over-allocated at 125% capacity and glowing an alarming red color.

After de-selecting "Automatic Bandwidth Configuration" you can assign your PCI cards to "Pool A" or "B" manually. I've set my work and sample drives to "Pool A" and the included USB connector card as well as a back-up SSD host card I use over to "Pool B." (From the wave pool to the wading pool? Time will tell.) The allocation bars are now in the "green" at 100% and 81% respectively.

Apparently slots 4 and 5 are the ones to avoid. My main work drives are in 6 and 7 so I'm not going to worry about the back-up drive in slot 5.

I still haven't put this to the test but I feel better about my chances now. Will report back after some larger tracking sessions. Really appreciate the shared information!
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  #12  
Old 08-28-2020, 11:31 PM
loud neighbor loud neighbor is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

Success!

It appears that either the update to 10.15.6 and/or the manual allocation of PCI bandwidth has brought a new era of peace and stability in the heart and mind of this simple man.

Now I can finally get around to recording the song that will bring peace and stability to the rest of the world = a smooth jazz instrumental of WAP. Amirite?
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  #13  
Old 09-01-2020, 12:55 PM
loud neighbor loud neighbor is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

I made another discovery that may be helpful to some. I had a new system-wide issue this morning. Booted up, couldn't type without a massive lag before whatever I typed showed up, Pro Tools and most other apps wouldn't even launch (like, click on the icon but nothing happens)... basically the OS was extremely sluggish and unresponsive - Safari / Mail wouldn't connect, etc. Three complete restarts, same problem. FUN TIMES.

After doing some research (on my phone of course), it seems that using the Thunderbolt ports on the GPU for anything other than a display MIGHT cause some issues. I had my display and a UAD TB box plugged (separately) into the GPU - W5700X in my case. It's convenient to use those ports since there are 4 of them but I moved the UAD TB cable to the last available non-GPU USB-C port and rebooted.

I'm now able to type and open programs again. YAY. Thanks Apple.

The good news is that I don't seem to have the original hard crash issue anymore but this new one might be even worse. I don't think re-allocating the PCI "Pools" had anything to do with it as you can't manually allocate the GPU. I didn't change anything else - it was working fine until I started it up this morning. Open to suggestions - I guess it was the GPU... I just don't know enough about this stuff to say with any certainty. All I'm offering is my own experience in the hopes that it helps some other frustrated soul. :)
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  #14  
Old 09-11-2020, 11:40 AM
loud neighbor loud neighbor is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

Welp, thought I had fixed my original issue but had another hard crash today within 20 seconds of recording 12 tracks of drums. Back to the drawing board.

FACTS:

- OS 10.15.6
- PT Ultimate 2020.9
- TB connections on separate busses: display (GPU), UAD Octo box, Aurora (n)
- 96k 32bit session
- Buffer 256 samples
- No plugins active except "Click"
- WTAF

"I can't work like this" -my inner monologue
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  #15  
Old 09-11-2020, 01:33 PM
loud neighbor loud neighbor is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

4th crash in a row while tracking. This is a joke.

No one else has had this issue?? PT freezes while recording / Mac OS hangs / hard reboot required.

At a total loss here. I don't know if this is an Avid or Apple (or OWC?) software or hardware issue... don't even know where to post about this. Where am I? Who am I???

And the worst part is that my smooth jazz cover of WAP will no longer bring world peace. We're ALL FFFFFF'd.
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  #16  
Old 09-11-2020, 02:06 PM
Marsdy Marsdy is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

Quote:
Originally Posted by loud neighbor View Post
4th crash in a row while tracking. This is a joke.

No one else has had this issue?? PT freezes while recording / Mac OS hangs / hard reboot required.

At a total loss here. I don't know if this is an Avid or Apple (or OWC?) software or hardware issue... don't even know where to post about this. Where am I? Who am I???

And the worst part is that my smooth jazz cover of WAP will no longer bring world peace. We're ALL FFFFFF'd.
We’re definitely all ******. That aside...

PT is crashing reading and writing to disk right? I’m on the same Mac and not having this issue. Difference here is I don’t have the OWC cards. I have the Sonnet RAID NVMe card for Kontakt, a second NVMEe adapter card/M2 for other libraries like Sine, SD3 etc. and a 3rd NVMEe adapter card/M2 for Pro Tools audio.

Differences in my system FWIW...
1. Pro Tools is not reading and writing to a RAID array - just the one M2 Drive.
2. I’m not using SoftRAID. I used Mac OS Disk Utility to creat the RAID0 array on the Sonnet card.

Assuming you’ve done all the Mac OS optimisations for PT, your stuff is up to date etc. I would pull The OWC cards and try recording to the Mac’s system drive - it’s easily fast enough.

Following on from that - maybe pull out the sample OWC card and reformat the remaining OWC with Mac OS disk utility as individual disks - not as a RAID. If you have the 4TB OWC it will have four 1TB M2 drives.

Maybe try running Blackmagic Speed Test for a few hours and see if it does t trip up. Unfortunately- there doesn’t seem to be a simple test utility for Mac disks, at least not that I’ve found.

NVMe M2 RAIDs are fantastic - but - if one disk in the RAID is intermittently off - then they’re all screwed.
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  #17  
Old 09-11-2020, 02:23 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is online now
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

So you are now two pages into a thread about a problem that you jumped to assume is about SSD, I'm not following why you assumed that. How about stepping back and going through fairly standard basic troubleshooting. If you have done that then great, but take the time to clearly describe here what you have done.

What happens when Pro Tools hangs? Does the mouse cursor freeze? Do other apps keep working OK? Can you raise/lower different pro tools windows, is there any way to get it to show any life? Before killing it next time it may be worth bringing up Activity Montro and see if Pro Tools is using a lot of CPU or Memory.

> Has anybody else had this issue?

Who on DUC is likely to read this thread? It's something about NVMe drives and *crashes*. And your problem is technically not a crash it's a hang... so chances of folks even if that have the problem clicking on this thread, wading through two pages of stuff and then answering your questions are about zero.

You can and already should have answered this question by searching DUC. But since the forum search is fairly useless do this using Google, and add

site:duc.avid.com

to the end of a google search string. And I expect that will show you folks are not having this problem a lot... if they were we would be hearing people scream about it here.

This seems a serious problem. Do you have an Avid support #? If you can't solve this any other way Avid may want to capture extra logging info.

With unusual stuff like this I would be looking at both the Console.app logs (starting with system.log, and Devices) and the Pro Tools logs (they are back in plain text so make use of that... what does the end of those logs look like for each hang).

Standard troubleshooting should look something like this. Trying to reproduce the problem between each step (but it's slow, so see note below).

o Trash Prefs
o Is the system fully optimized (just run through that shutting off as much as you can, it's unlikely to be a cause of this behavior but just worth running through that, if for no other reason support and others are likely to ask)
o Try with other sessions or session created from scratch (none based on copies of your current session, or common ancestors/templates).
o Test using Built-In Output as the playback engine (if it only happens when recording so many tracks then that's not useful... try to find another way to exclude that interface and driver... is the driver up to date? reinstall it anyhow... still less likely to be a problem as Pro Tools is fairly good at complaining about/falling over when there are issues).
o Move all plugins to the Unused folder, trash prefs again.
o Create a new admin user and test from that account.

Keep layering stuff on as you do these. Like test from a new admin user account starting with a new session, using built in output as the playback engine, and after trashing prefs. It often pays to do an extreme version of all you can change reasonably and test that first... if the problem still exists you have excluded lots of things in one step.

o Still problems you can try reinstalling Pro Tools
o Still problems do a clean full install of macOS on a spare APFS container (if you have space) and just install Pro Tools, ILM and the interface driver and see if that works). ... and maybe that is worth jumping to directly. You have what may well be a sick Mac I would not be doing in situ updates, get a clean macOS install if things look wonky and test from there.

And I'd hope you are using disk cache and of a decent size compared to the amount of data in 16 tracks... so that what you are recording should be in the cache. If for some reason you suspect the NVMe drive moving your session to a different drive, like the boot drive, should exclude that. But I'd not be spending time doing that until you have done some systematic standard troubleshooting.
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  #18  
Old 10-29-2021, 01:17 PM
geetar777 geetar777 is offline
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

SO, you're in luck.....I have the EXACT same problem. Started about 3 weeks ago for me. Mac Pro 2019 12 core OSX 10.15.7. Pro Tools Ultimate as of 1 week ago, but was having same issue with Pro Tools standard. System hang while recording. Hard restart required. This system ran great for months. Internal OWC SSD 1 TB drive.

Any ideas or fixes so far??

I'm, not sure who to contact Avid or Apple. I contacted OWC. I ran Softraid which reported the drive is fine, but I still don't believe it's good.
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  #19  
Old 10-29-2021, 01:41 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is online now
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

Quote:
Originally Posted by geetar777 View Post
SO, you're in luck.....I have the EXACT same problem. Started about 3 weeks ago for me. Mac Pro 2019 12 core OSX 10.15.7. Pro Tools Ultimate as of 1 week ago, but was having same issue with Pro Tools standard. System hang while recording. Hard restart required. This system ran great for months. Internal OWC SSD 1 TB drive.

Any ideas or fixes so far??

I'm, not sure who to contact Avid or Apple. I contacted OWC. I ran Softraid which reported the drive is fine, but I still don't believe it's good.
So the first test I would do is try that identical session on the internal Apple boot/system SSD. I would make sure nothing else is using that OWC drive and unmount it from the system, or maybe even pull it out of its slot. You just want to as quickly as possible exclude/include the OWC drive as a suspect--especially since these problems are typically more likely to be caused by a corrupt session or software compatibility issue, like plugins or interface drivers than caused by storage devices.

And just to be cautious, you don't know you have the _EXACT_ same problem (or at least not he same cause) as anybody else posting in this thread, all you have sofar is some of the same problem symptoms. It _might_ be a very different cause.

You can also look though the multiple logs (in Console.app) for any "interesting" errors that happen around the time you see a problem. If lost there ask for help.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 10-29-2021 at 08:27 PM.
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  #20  
Old 10-29-2021, 01:49 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is online now
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Default Re: Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

And if you want to contact Avid Support you just need to create a case: https://www.avid.com/learn-and-suppo...-music-support

You should have support included with your new Ultimate license, so you don't need to purchase an ASC.
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