Sleeping a Mac

[penx]

Hi, I've been using my Digi Rack for about 2 years now, first with Logic and now I've moved over to Pro Tools. I use my computer for a lot of things other than making music so obviously make use of 'sleep' quite a lot.

I've been putting up with Pro Tools crashing when it wakes from sleep for the last 2 years, and can kind of understand why it happens (Pro Tools wasn't designed to keep the audio connection active when the computer is asleep and it would probably be a very hard task to change it to get it to work).

I'm assuming that this bug can't be fixed easily, however, there are 2 things that would make things a whole lot better:

1. Macs don't go to sleep when Apple DVD player is playing a dvd. This indicates that there is a toggle in the OS to prevent the computer auto-sleeping, can this be put into Pro Tools too?

2. The problem has been present for at least the past 2 years, but the Core Audio Manager and Pro Tools both unexpectedly quit, can this error be caught and handled in a more user friendly way, maybe allowing you to save your session first?

[DJ Insomaniac]

Not to sound like a jerk (you make very good points), but since you know that this is an issue, then just turn off the auto sleep features and not sleep your mac while ProTools is on. Still, the DVD player thing is a good point.

[penx]

I use my Mac for a lot of things other than Pro Tools and I find the auto-sleep function very useful. I have been living with this bug but hoped that it would have been addressed at some point as sleeping your computer is pretty much a standard thing these days. If I was running with a laptop/M-Box setup this would be even worse.

The other issue here is that if you use Core Audio Manager then that crashes too. This means you can't sleep your computer unless you wanted to re-launch all applications that require sound afterwards (I've given up on Core Audio Manager now and just put my Mac out through my Alt Src, works but defeats all the work that has gone into Core Audio Manager).

[M.Brane]

I never sleep my Macs. It causes more problems than it solves IMHO. Been that way since OS8.

[Kling3]

Your lucky all you've had were crashes. I lost everything on my audio drive... EVERYTHING! And that was because I walked away from an open PT session for an hour and apparently someone else who didn't know better put the system to sleep. Once is all it took. Your flirting with disaster.

[penx]

My experiences are that sleeping has generally been pretty solid since OSX. Since 10.3 I haven't had a problem with it outside of Pro Tools/Core Audio Manager and often sleep my computer several times a day or leave it asleep overnight. I think the uptime of my computer has often reached a month or more and sometimes I only restart/shutdown if I'm going away or installing new software.

I understand the warnings about sleeping a Mac that is set up for Pro Tools, but if the potential risks are so severe I would say this is even more reason for it to be addressed by Digidesign.

[fire2k2]

As far back as I can remember, PT has never supported sleep.* That means if you have a session open and leave your computer, when you come back you'll have to restart or at least force quit.* The DVD player thing is different because while the DVD is playing it's using resources like CPU, HD, and memory.* While PT is not playing for a while it's using nothing.* If you left PT playing I'm sure the computer wouldn't sleep.

[penx]

My Pro Tools takes up 50% of the cpu and has 1gb of virtual memory even when idle, but still sleeps - I think applications like the dvd player keep the computer awake by listening for power change events and cancelling them, as described here:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2004/qa1340.html

[penx]

As far back as I can remember, PT has never supported sleep.

The problem here is that DigiDesign's customer base is changing, with products like the M-Box and increased support for Audio Instruments they are marketing more and more towards people with home studios.

If you also look at the stability of OSX and the fact that you don't need to turn your computer off every day, you'll find that a lot of home users like myself will regularly use sleep, laptop users even more so.

I'm not asking for this issue to be addressed immediately, but I imagine that these crashes could be handled better with very little work and it would be nice to know that DigiDesign have it on the agenda for some point in the future.

[maccool]

I never sleep my Macs. It causes more problems than it solves IMHO. Been that way since OS8.

I agree with M.Brane, and I don't put my G5 to sleep, I just turn off the displays; it's the startup which causes more wear and tear to critical moving parts than constant running. How many critical moving parts are there? Just drives and fans, and that's enough! Sleep will save energy, and stop the noise; either or both may be important for some, especially laptop users, and it is for those people that I think Digi ought to address this issue.