Yesterday night, while rehearsing with my band, GigPerformer crashed several times.
In fact, having looked at the MacOS crash reports, I can see that it only crashed twice (GP was closed immediately), but some other times (at least 4) I had to force close GigPerformer because it was stuck/hanged up.
The problem was noticeable whenever I had to change rackspace, and it was also in this type of situation that GP shuted down immediately on the 2 occasions when an error report was generated.
At least twice after restarting GP and loading my GigFile, immediately after switching from the first to the second rackspace, GP froze or crashed.
It’s certain that I’m dealing with a RAM management problem. Although I have a Mac with 32GB RAM, my Gigfile already has more than 100 rackspaces and RAM utilisation is at its limit. With that in mind, I tried using predictive loading, but the problem remained, with GP getting stuck several times, so it’s not a RAM problem.
Two notes that can, eventually, be related:
The audio interface I use in the rehearsal room (Roland Quad-Capture) is different from the one I work with at home and intend to use at concerts (MOTU M6). However, I find it difficult to understand that the problem lies with the audio interface because I’ve rehearsed several times with the Quad-Capture and I’ve never had any problems.
The truth is that, apart from the problems with the GP (or because of them?) throughout the rehearsal I had terrible sound quality. The sound always came out distorted, with a terrible quality (as if it had an absurd equalisation, with no treble) which was a complete contrast to previous rehearsals. I can’t understand why, since I haven’t changed any of the parameters of the hardware I use.
Can anyone help me understand the problem? I’m only a few weeks away from starting this year’s tour and I can’t be held hostage by a system that doesn’t give me the minimum guarantee of reliability.
Someone with real knowledge will review the crash report.
In the meantime, do you not have any issues when you use your MOTO M6?
Maybe somehow the Quad Capture has a very small buffer that strains your computer? Maybe check the audio buffer and sample rate on both audio interfaces?
As soon as I came home, I conected my Mac to my MOTU, loaded GP and everything was ok (so it seems).
About the Quad-Capture, I have tryed different combinations of sample rate and audio buffer with no visible results. The fact is I have been using it with different settings and it behaved ok until now, so I’m not sure it could be the culprit.
Well, that’s weird, since I have been using tha Quad-Capture for a few months now and had no issues untill yesterday. I also didn’t uninstall any drivers, so, I’m kind of lost here!
There’s no magic here - unless there’s a hardware issue, clearly something changed on your system – any possible OS update or driver update? Installation of new plugin or any other changes.
After you double check that your home set up works fine, I might look at everything that is different in the rehearsal room. In addition to the audio driver, is there a USB Hub involved? Different USB Cables? What is different? (Along with David’s question: “what changed?”)
The only change I could remember is I tryed, just before the reharsal start, to connect a midi controller (ROLAND GFC-50) to my audio interface in order to test it in GP.
Apparently GIP Performer didn’t identify the ROLAND controller (it didn’t show up in midi devices) and I haven’t had time to test it again either, nor do I know if I’ll have to install any kind of driver. So I simply removed the midi cable from the audio interface.
Could this have somehow introduced problems in the Quad-Capture’s operation?