Latest Protools crashing on idle

[ajazzie]

Hi all

I’ve installed the latest PT studio on a previous rock solid system.
Win 11 up to date.

Ptools is now crashing if I leave it idle for say 1 hr or more, I come back after a good break and it won’t play audio. Has to be rebooted.

I don’t allow sleep mode or USB to power down.

I’ve checked the usual culprits but to no avail. Is this a known bug with the latest install or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance. 🙂

[Darryl Ramm]

If folks are noticing problems they would likely be on here complaining about it.

What exactly do you mean by crash? If there are crash logs or files then what clues do they give... especially stack traces?

What does the Pro Tools logs show if anything? Especially comparing logs when this happens against logs from previous versions of Pro Tools where this did not happen.

Saying you checked "usual culprits" is useless non-information, how can we guess what you mean? What exactly have you tried? trashing prefs? removing all .aaxplugin files, testing as a new admin user, etc.

What does the Windows event log show around the crash time?

[albee1952]

Good questions from Darryl. From my own experience over many years of using PT, I try to never leave a session open and unattended. If I'm taking a lunch break, I close the session as I have had freezing or crashing many times over many versions. That said, in newer versions, I have not seen it here(I do tend to try to break things, just to see what happens)

Things that might be worth a look:
1-if you have spinning hard drives, are they going to sleep?
2-USB Power Management should be checked anyway because SOME Windows updates will reset that feature(see this at least twice in the past year).
3-these days, if I leave a session open as you describe, it will take 10-20 seconds for it to "come back to life" and this may be that my sessions are still running on spinning drives(haven't spent the money to replace all my old drives yet).

[ajazzie]

Sorry Guys, bit vague I know, I just skipped the basics as I was more interested if someone else had this issue or it was known and common with the upgrade.

In answer to Darryl first - By crash its hard to explain, My log files are not reflecting problems.

What happens is bazaar, I leave a session open (or protools open without a session open) and upon return after say 1 hr the playback won't start and even stranger my mouse which is a trackball loses its functionality except for single click.

What I have done-

Trashed all Pref's.
No drives are allowed to sleep. No spinning drives.
I have also unchecked the USB ,
I have NOT removed the aaxplugin files, I don't think its plugin related as while running its very smooth and did not have this issue before upgrading.

I always run as ADMIN, I have not tried as a new user?

It is certainly just started, Ive been using protools since 1998, all versions and several carnations, I am sorry for being vague as most things I have done to troubleshoot are just second nature and I skipped adding that,

hopefully there's just a bug or someone else may have this problem.

Thanks .

[Darryl Ramm]

So not a crash at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You do need to work on describing stuff better.

When the playback won't start what exactly happens? What exactly do you see? Transport buttons light up different colors? The UI seems totally dead? How do you eventually resolve this?

Do other apps behave OK when this is happening?

Does Task Manager show anything unusual? High CPU, memory, network I/O usage etc.

What log files are you talking about? Pro Tools? Windows event log? None show *anything* curious? Can you capture exactly what the last thing in the Pro Tools log before you try to wake up Pro Tools, that may be a clue.

It does not matter that you have not upgraded plugins, you changed the version of Pro Tools, which always introduces some risk of breaking compatibility or causing problems. e.g. maybe introduce a memory leak. So just move all .aaxplugin files out of the folder and see if the problem can be reproduced. Hopefully that fairly quickly excludes or includes plugins as suspects. Some of the things you are describing may well be caused by memory leaks. You should exclude that.

It's often much faster to aggressively just troubleshoot stuff. Slice off huge parts of the potential problem space.

So same approach with a new admin account to make sure it's not something or some other app etc. (also checks you have trashed prefs properly) in that account. Just do the test.

And as always with Windows... make sure any antivirus software is fully disabled or maybe better uninstalled.

Make sure you are not accidentally working with session content on cloud storage. Make sure that OneDrive has not infected your computer.

Make sure no backup tasks are running/trying to run, last overnight or whatever backups finished OK etc.

If Pro Tools is really hung you should be able to force it to crash/dump/get a stack trace. Sysinternals ProcDump or Process Explorer would be the first things I would reach for to grab a mini-dump or dump. (Process Explorer also let you walk the thread stacks in real time).

[ajazzie]

Thank you Darryl

A lot to digest there, thank you for taking the time.

I’ll try some of this now and let you know.

Regards.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by ajazzie

I always run as ADMIN, I have not tried as a new user?

Hmmm, 2 things here:
1-the "new user" bit I think may only apply to Mac users
2-Run as Admin was something we needed to do when we were running Windows 7. With Win10/11, this is no longer the case and I stopped doing this at least 2 years ago. While I can't promise its the solution for you, I can say that it works absolutely fine, and maybe smoother than previously. Next time you install Pro Tools, skip that bit and see what happens.

Last thought, maybe its not actually a PT problem, but something operating in the background that maybe chews up RAM. Bring up Task Manager and go to the performance tab and leave that up in the corner when you take a long break. If PT is frozen when you come back, maybe that tab will reveal something?

[Darryl Ramm]

No. The new [admin] user test should be tried on Windows as well. It's helped folks out on DUC in the last week or so.

This has nothing at all to do with trying to run Pro Tools as admin. It's about getting a new clean user account, hopefully in a known state. Which is part of standard troubleshooting on Windows. I would use an admin account, that makes sure that user can administer Windows, and won't run into issues trying to do stuff. That new account will starts up with a minimum of craplets and startup/background apps. A minimum user registry mess, and certainly in the case of Pro Tools a totally clean set of preferences just in case trashing prefs was not tried correctly (and right now I suspect most users are doing that incorrectly, missing the new style plugin cache files). Now a new admin account won't guarantee there are no shared craplets or startup things being run (check for those as well) but it's a good place to start. Including making sure that the account is not using OneDrive etc. And a good place to screw around in that might minimize other potential damage to the system.

And as with many other good troubleshooting steps, it's fast to do and safe, this should take minutes to setup create, and however long it takes to try to reproduce the behavior.