Spinning wheel of death and Pro Tools Ultimate...

[itsjustmeee123]

Originally Posted by JFreak

So I guess my comments kind of confirmed you to put the blame on NI and please spam their customer service until they get their act together. I hate it that it crashes so often. Very embarassing when someone mainly using LogicX comes over and rolls his eyes waiting for yet another PT restart...

I have Logic X as well. I'm a long time Pro Tools user but I figured for 200 bucks I couldn't go wrong. I spent about 2 weeks learning it and liked it (and actually did a full on session with it) but ultimately I went back to PT since I know it so well.

[JFreak]

Sure. Just that Kontakt AAX sucks, heavy VI users who want to use PT are using a wrapper to run Kontakt AU -- that says a lot.

[itsjustmeee123]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Sure. Just that Kontakt AAX sucks, heavy VI users who want to use PT are using a wrapper to run Kontakt AU -- that says a lot.

Ok, I can confirm this ... after I load a large VI heavy session, I get the spinning wheel of death. It spins for about 2 minutes and then goes away. After that my session works just fine. I'm sure there's some Kontakt 6 memory issue here but it's beyond my grasp. (And I did turn on Memory Server. It didn't seem to make any difference.

[lesbrunn]

Originally Posted by itsjustmeee123

When ever I do a larger midi score with lots of virtual instruments loaded into Kontakt and I load the session, Pro Tools stops responding after a few seconds and I get the spinning wheel of death so I have to force quit it, trash the Pro Tools preferences folder, restart the computer and it works fine. Looks like it's Kontakt that's causing it to crash (I'm not sure and that's why I'm not posting this in the virtual instruments section). There's no audio tracks, it's just Kontakt 6.2.2 with probably about 15 virtual instruments loaded into about 4 Kontakt tracks. I'm using Pro Tools Ultimate on a new iMac with 64 gigs of ram running Catalina.

And my hardware buffer is set to 1024

Any ideas what could be causing this?

I didn't realize the SWOD also affected Mac users. I thought it was a Windows 10 issue...So now it seems it's specific to PT. I used to get it randomly (not necessarily with Kontakt; it could happen when committing a track) and very frequently with my old i75820k processor that died (which incidentally was rock-solid with other DAWs).The problem seems to be PT's inability to use CPU efficiently. I was able to reduce the frequency of occurrence with Process Lasso, but since I changed to a faster and more powerful processor it now happens very rarely. I can now work with much lower hardware buffers.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by lesbrunn

PT's inability to use CPU efficiently

Only ever happens with Kontakt

[lesbrunn]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Only ever happens with Kontakt

Not necessarily for me, but always with large sessions. I used to get SWODs without any instances of Kontakt. Of course, I'm a Windows user so it could be different.

[itsjustmeee123]

Well what through me about this is being a Mac user for many years now, I always found that when a program gets the spinning wheel of death, it's pretty much toast and you have to force quit and either relaunch it or usually in Pro Tools case restart the computer. This is the only instance where the wheel just spins and after a few minutes it recovers itself and all is fine. Only by chance did I discover that by getting frustrated and walking away from my Mac while the wheel was spinning and coming back to have it gone.

[TNM]

Originally Posted by itsjustmeee123

Thanks for the replies.

I have the session loaded right now and the activity monitor says that Pro Tools is using 14.90GB of ram. I have 64 GB of physical memory and 37.86 total memory used. Maybe memory isn't the issue.

I'll try turning on Kontakt Memory Sever and see if that helps.

I tried replacing all 4 instances of Kontakt 6 with Kontakt 5 AAX but I can't because some of the virtual instruments (like Chris Hein Emotional violin) won't load. It gives me the message that Kontakt 5 is outdated and I need to use a newer version.

I do have Amplitude but it's not being used for this session. As a matter of fact, the only plugin is one Avid Channel Strip on the master channel. The 3 virtual instrument plugins I'm using are Kontakt 6.2.2 (the latest update), EW Play, and UVI workstation for the piano. Everything is the latest update. The whole system is brand new including the iMac.

Oddly enough when I saw the spinning wheel of death last night, I just left my studio came back about 3 minutes later and it worked just fine. I'm wondering if it takes a bit longer to load the samples the the various libraries. I have everything on SSDs but it still may be that simple of an issue. I believe though that it is Kontakt because I tried making a new session and importing instrument tracks one at time and it did crash without Play and UVI loaded.

I'll keep trying to isolate the problem and keep everyone posted. It just may be that Catalina and Kontakt don't play nice together like JFreak suggested.

Memory not the issue indeed.. your best bet is to try the AU in the patchwork demo at www.bluecataudio.com
that will also fix the timing issues

If it doesn't crash you can even tell NI, hey, the AU works in a demo of a wrapper i tried, that proves it..

[Downtown_BE]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Sure. Just that Kontakt AAX sucks, heavy VI users who want to use PT are using a wrapper to run Kontakt AU -- that says a lot.

are yur sure kontakt AU on protools (with a wrapper) works better?? aax is hell here too..!

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Downtown_BE

are yur sure kontakt AU on protools (with a wrapper) works better?? aax is hell here too..!

In here at least