Issue with spinning beach ball & blue DYN

[ThinDave]

Hey all, I've fixed the problem I was having, now I just want to figure out what was causing it.

I have a 2018.12 tracking session on my 2012 Mac Mini, MacOS 10.13.6, using UA Apollo interfaces (Twin Duo and 8p) and two Thunderbolt satellites. My session has 17 tracks right now - 8 are mono audio tracks and the rest are stereo instrument tracks - 2 EZDrummer2, 4 EZKeys, 2 Falcon and 1 Waves Electric 88.

Everything was good yesterday - opened up with no problems, playback was fine (buffer is set to 2048).

Today, my monitor was dead (LG UltraWide 34" - ugh! But, under warranty still!) so I had to swap in a different display. Now, I was using the two Thunderbolt ports on the LG to let me daisy chain like this: Mac Mini->LG->8p->TB Octo 1->TB Octo 2->Apollo Twin Duo - that all worked great. Without the dual ports on the display, I needed to take the Apollo Twin out of the loop since I only have a single TB port on the Mac - no big deal!

I do all that, restart and open up my project. As soon as I try to hit play, I get the beachball. Retried a few times - same thing. Started up and bypassed plugins worked, so I started to re-enable each plugin and VI. I got to my bass track (mono audio) and when I enabled an EQ on there, beachball. Maybe it's the UAD SSL plugin? Doubtful, but I reinstalled anyway...

Restarted, and same issue - beachball as soon as I hit play. But this time, I notice that on my two audio bass tracks, their "dyn" buttons are blue. I can't see if my other audio tracks are the same, as they're off the screen...

So, I futzed around for another half hour trying different combinations of things (Importing the session data into a new session - still no good) until I started up without plugins again, hid and made the bass track inactive, then imported session data from a back to bring in the bass track without the plugins. That worked. I then un-hid the original bass track, moved the EQ plugin (not the SSL, just the EQ7 from avid) back onto the track, deleted the original bass track, saved, closed, re-opened and everything was good!

So, what I'm trying to figure out if why were those tracks coming up with blue Dyn buttons? Am I running out of voices? I wouldn't think so - especially since I hadn't added anything from the last time it was saved...

Any insight would be appreciated!

[john1192]

Originally Posted by ThinDave

Hey all, I've fixed the problem I was having, now I just want to figure out what was causing it.

I have a 2018.12 tracking session on my 2012 Mac Mini, MacOS 10.13.6, using UA Apollo interfaces (Twin Duo and 8p) and two Thunderbolt satellites. My session has 17 tracks right now - 8 are mono audio tracks and the rest are stereo instrument tracks - 2 EZDrummer2, 4 EZKeys, 2 Falcon and 1 Waves Electric 88.

Everything was good yesterday - opened up with no problems, playback was fine (buffer is set to 2048).

Today, my monitor was dead (LG UltraWide 34" - ugh! But, under warranty still!) so I had to swap in a different display. Now, I was using the two Thunderbolt ports on the LG to let me daisy chain like this: Mac Mini->LG->8p->TB Octo 1->TB Octo 2->Apollo Twin Duo - that all worked great. Without the dual ports on the display, I needed to take the Apollo Twin out of the loop since I only have a single TB port on the Mac - no big deal!

I do all that, restart and open up my project. As soon as I try to hit play, I get the beachball. Retried a few times - same thing. Started up and bypassed plugins worked, so I started to re-enable each plugin and VI. I got to my bass track (mono audio) and when I enabled an EQ on there, beachball. Maybe it's the UAD SSL plugin? Doubtful, but I reinstalled anyway...

Restarted, and same issue - beachball as soon as I hit play. But this time, I notice that on my two audio bass tracks, their "dyn" buttons are blue. I can't see if my other audio tracks are the same, as they're off the screen...

So, I futzed around for another half hour trying different combinations of things (Importing the session data into a new session - still no good) until I started up without plugins again, hid and made the bass track inactive, then imported session data from a back to bring in the bass track without the plugins. That worked. I then un-hid the original bass track, moved the EQ plugin (not the SSL, just the EQ7 from avid) back onto the track, deleted the original bass track, saved, closed, re-opened and everything was good!

So, what I'm trying to figure out if why were those tracks coming up with blue Dyn buttons? Am I running out of voices? I wouldn't think so - especially since I hadn't added anything from the last time it was saved...

Any insight would be appreciated!

Hi, i will take a Stab .. have you seen this thread .. ??

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=377577

if i find anything else .. i will post again .... i have been trying to Make It Happen here but no luck so far ..

cheers john

[ThinDave]

I did see that thread, which had some interesting info in it, but I hadn't updated any plugins in between the successful session open and the one where I blueDyn'd™ :)

[Sean Bombz]

I’ve had the same problem and it seems to happen when I have uad ssl e channel plug ins in the session.

[ThinDave]

Wow, crazy - same plugin for me. I’m using UAD 9.8 - you?

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by ThinDave

Wow, crazy - same plugin for me. I’m using UAD 9.8 - you?

I see that you and Sean are both running Apollo Twins. Could this be the cause?

Dave:
In your case it doesn't seem to be an update thing like in the linked-to thread but I wonder if removing the Twin in your reworked setup somehow changed whatever addressing scheme UAD uses for their h/w? Maybe it's the old thing of changing daisy-chain order to get things to work right like we used to do back in the old Firewire days?

[ThinDave]

Originally Posted by musicman691

I see that you and Sean are both running Apollo Twins. Could this be the cause?

Dave:
In your case it doesn't seem to be an update thing like in the linked-to thread but I wonder if removing the Twin in your reworked setup somehow changed whatever addressing scheme UAD uses for their h/w? Maybe it's the old thing of changing daisy-chain order to get things to work right like we used to do back in the old Firewire days?

Maybe, I didn't even think that was a "thing", though with the TB devices. I ran with a twin and single OCTO for a few years before adding the 8p and 2nd OCTO last year - didn't have any issues when I added them. Maybe I'll ask the UA guys...