What's the best way to troubleshoot or just fix stability issues?

#1

Hi-

I’m a IT professional but relatively new to software-based sound generation. I been learning and using GP for the last few months. However, my main gigfile is now so unstable as to be unusable. Here are some of the issues:

  1. The gigfile will sometimes hang on startup. It won’t always hang on the same plugin. It has hung on Garritan’s CFX piano, AAS Lounge Lizard and NI Session Horns, among others. When this happens I can generally do a force quit, restart GP and it will work. This has been happening for a long time (several weeks).

  2. In the last two days, the time it has taken to switch from one rackspace to another has gone from instantaneous or a few seconds to several minutes.

  3. As I have documented in a different thread, I have one plugin that will sometimes stop sounding when I switch away and back. This has been happening for a couple of weeks.

  4. Trying to do anything where GP has to write to disk (save gigfile, export rackspaces, etc.) has gotten slow. (I’ve got a standard Apple SSD, which is very fast.) This just started happening today.

I’ve checked the health of the SSD and it is fine. I’ve also wiped the contents of the ~/Library/Cache/Gig Performer 3 and ~/Library/Application Support/GigPerformer directories. There was nothing in the ~/Library/Application Support/GigPerformer3 directory, btw.

I should mention that I just finished adding the DPMeter4 plugin from TBProAudio to all the rackspaces. This was to equalize the loudness across rackspaces. (BTW, this worked great. I hope that this isn’t one of the problems.)

What’s the best procedure for troubleshooting or just fixing this? Some things I could try:

  • Remove dpMeter4 from rackspaces

  • Create a new gigfile and export the rackspaces from the old gigfile to the new one.

  • Create a new gigfile and rebuild the rackspaces from scratch

  • Reinstall plugins

  • Reinstall Gig Performer

  • Rebuild MacBook…

I’m hoping to get some guidance on the most efficient procedure for fixing this issue. I’ve got a gig on Tuesday and would really like to get this working properly. I do have a backup laptop but I don’t want to use it if I don’t have to.

Thanks,

Ezra Herman

#2

IT Guy here as well. :slightly_smiling_face: Can you create a new GIG file, and insert 1 plug in at a time? Save, reload it?

Trying to identify by process of elimination. Sometimes I’ve discovered ONE misbehaved Plug-In this way.

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#3

Agree with that, though if you have a large gig file, you might be better served duplicating your gig (Save As), and then removing one plugin at a time (starting with dpMeter4, obviously), until you’ve reached the results you were used to prior to this new, bugged behavior. Your main gig will remain intact until you can source the problem.

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#4

Yeah… what @edm11 said :grinning:

#5

Thanks for the comments. I just started rebuilding my gigfile and so far the instability is gone. I have noticed two things:

  1. My rigfile completely disappeared on me (bummer, it was pretty detailed). This to me suggest that my old gigfile had suffered some kind of corruption. As I’m not experienced with GP I have no idea if this can happen.

  2. I had exported my rackspaces from my old gigfile. When I imported them into my new gigfile they behaved fine, with one exception. When I imported my Arturia Clavinet rackspace it took a very long time to load. This was one of the unstable behaviors II had been experiencing on my old gigfile. I then deleted the Clavinet rackspace and recreated it from scratch and the load times cleared up. I’d love to know why this happens but I’m blaming at least part of my issues on a funky rackspace. Does this make sense?

  3. The problem with a plugin not sounding when I switched away and back appears to be fixed.

So. This is all good news. So far it seems that recreating my gigfile has fixed my stability issues. However, it brings up a couple of other questions.

  1. Does it make sense that a single rackspace can create problems for an entire gigfile so as the ones that I mentioned?

  2. Is there anything I can do to reduce the chance of my gigfile getting corrupted?

Thanks to everyone for their help.

-Ezra

#6

Yes it does. Your plugins are essentially piece of code that becomes part of Gig Performer. If one plugin crashes - the entire application hosting it crashes. This is true for ANY plugin host. If a plugin takes a long time to load - there is not a lot that the host application can do to change that. You’d be better served contacting the plugin manufacturer and reporting a problem.

Gig files don’t really get corrupted. You may be inserting an unstable plugin into one of the rackspaces. What I typically do is have a backup of all my working, tried and tested, gig files which I can get back to.

On your comment of taking a long time to switch to a rackspace … that’s something that’s really, really strange unless you’re using predictive loading and jumping around rackspaces.

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#7

Ezra, do you use scripting in your rackspaces?
If so, this could well cause some problems too.

#8

OK, that’s good to know. I was jumping back and forth between backspaces with predictive loading enabled (doing testing and diagnostics at that point).

I had a few issues that I think were combining to create diagnostic difficulties but I think I have a good picture of what was going on.

For the benefit of those following my various threads, here’s what may have happened:

  1. Problems with a plugin not sounding after switching away and then back- This has been corroborated by another user’s experience with the same plugin (Arturia Mellotron V). Perhaps exacerbated by other issues.

  2. Long load times when switching between rackspaces - could easily have been caused by trouble with Arturia Clavinet plugin.

  3. Hangs while loading gigfile - same thing.

  4. Problems when trying to save changes to disk - not sure about this. However, this didn’t start happening until after I deleted the global settings and with it the rig manager mappings. I’m inclined to think that this contributed to the issue.

I’m still puzzled by why the Clavinet plugin caused such issues but behaved properly when I just created a new rackspace with identical settings…

But as I said, I’m in IT as well and know when to be happy with a working solution. I’ll chase down the Clavinet plugin issue if it rears its ugly head again.

Thanks to all that contributed to these threads.

-Ezra

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#9

Can I ask what are the stats on your MacBook? processor/disk/etc…

#10

Sure. It’s got a 2.9 GHz I7, 8GB of RAM and your standard Apple 512GB SSD.

-Ezra

#11

There is an easy way to reproduce this kind of behaviour. It happens when you have an OSC enabled gigfile and the network used for OSC is down. Each time GP tries to send a single OSC message there is a time out delay of about 3sec (if I remember well) until GP notices that the network is down.

#12

Hmm, if you’re using OSC, better make sure the network is working :wink:

#13

Of course :wink: But imagine you didn’t plan to use it, but inadvertently enabled the OSC option…

#14

Hmm, I wonder if we should try and ping the address to make sure it’s there.

#15

Difficult question :thinking: