ALTIVERB 6.1 TDM in Large Sessions

[minister]

Hi All,

system:

PT|HD ACELL 4 on a PPC Dual 2.5, DIGIDESIGN EXPANSION CHASSIS HD, 6 G RAM, 0S 10.4.9, v7.3.1cs6 and Altiverb 6.1.4 TDM (the latest)

I get problems opening Sessions when I have more than one Altiverb plug-in in a large session. What I mean is, over 60 tracks, and where it has caused me the biggest headaches is where I am running 100+ tracks. My Number of Voices is at least 144, but often 196. According to System Usage, there is room on the cards. H/W buffer set to 1024 (per tech support with a Digi Expansion Chassis HD) The session will start to open and then hang as it tries to open the Insert on the Aux. Remedy: force quit, restart. If it hangs again, the other remedy is to trash all prefs and not reset any. Then the session will open fine. This is strange, it is almost as if a selected pref causes this bug, if that is what it is. Because, once I reset my prefs, then I cannot open the session again.

My final remedy, before I follow up again with AudioEase and Digi Tech support is to put the plug-in at the head of the stack. Normally I put, going left to right/top to bottom, DX, then PFX, then Foley, then FX, then BG's then Music, THEN the busses for the various things and then the Reverb Buses including AV. So instead of putting the AV in the last to load, I put the busses up first. Problem solved. Almost always.

This never happens with the RTAS version, but with all the routing, the latency kills me.

I did have this issue before and called Digi tech support but we found a bad ACCELL card. That has since been replaced and all cards pass Digi Test.

I know there were problems in the past with AV TDM and an Expansion Chassis, but I believe AudioEase addressed those issues. Mostly, AV works great! No other issues with it.

I am just throwing this out there to see if anyone else is having this issue. I will contact AudioEase on Monday as well as Digi.

Thanks for reading.

[minister]

Got a note from Audioease Support. They know about this. It has something to do with bus contention during the loading when everyone is asking for DSP. It happens mostly with Exp Chassis, but can without.

They hope to release a fix very soon.

good news!

[gugu]

Yes, thanks for the news...

I was waiting to answer because I was beginning a mix today in a mixing theater where I had the same issues as yours (PT HD 6 + Ethernet chassis) , and I was very hopefull with your workaround placing the AV aux tracks at the beginning........but...no luck... the sesssion that was running fine on my HD3 without chassis (82 tcks with 2 TDM AV and one RTAS w/ADC) is crashing their system badly.....So we had to transfer the reverbs and all their automations in another slave Mac.

Do you know if AE have a schedule?

cheers
gugu

[minister]

Hi gugu,

Too bad the work around did not work for you!

AudioEase actually said that they hope to have the fix this week. No promises, but, let's say very soon........

[gugu]

let's cross fingers....

may be it will help

gugu

[matt-o-]

I too have similar problems here. I wanted to use a FX PT (G5 HD2 PCIe) as an altiverb-machine with 4x mono altiverbs (originally 8x mono with automation) but, first, programming the automation was too tedious and unreliable for me in parallel with mixing, an second, it crashed on either closing or opening the session. I made some tests and as soon as I had several altiverbs with different programs (IRs) it gets unstable very easy. We made a hardware check, but everything showed up ok. Later on we discovered, that there was an unused FW card in a PCIe slot (it seemed, that it was used with a mojo before). But they already had changed the machine for another G5 with slightly different (more) GHz, and at least the problem with the session opening and closing disappeared (for now). But similar problems turn up with my HD3 on MacPro as well. When I put mono altiverbs on every available dsp slot (A and P versions mixed) they open fine when they all have the same IR program. As soon as every altiverb has to load its own IR, problems with the session occur extremely fast.

It made me feel a bit annoyed about altiverb. I would like to use it more on the mixing stage, preferable in an automated manner, but you really would need a good operator for this, as it takes up a lot of energy to do this.

greetings,
matthias

[minister]

New Version of Altiverrb is up !!!!

6.2.0

Altiverb 6.2.0 release notes:

* [PT TDM] The TDM version has a fix to make reloading a session with several Altiverbs active reliable. Data traffic to and from the DSPs could be hampered during load of a session, especially with an Expansion Chassis (ethernet or Magma) is connected. The fix makes the traffic reliable, albeit on a chassis somewhat slower.


Will report back...................have to mix this weekend.......

[gugu]

The chassis issue is fixed

I loaded my original session in the mixing stage.....and it works......

have a good day.

gugu

[minister]

Yes! Fixed it here too!