The good news is I got a Mac Pro. The bad news is, I'm glitching more than ever...

[infiniteposse]

Hi all-

I'm a longtime Logic user (started @ v3.0 around 1997 or so) who's been on a Mac for about 3 years now. I've been waiting for some time time upgrade my Dual 800 mirror-door mac to one of the new super-machines and I finally made the plunge. Here's the tech specifics of the new machine: Logic 7.2.3 , Macpro 2.66, 5 gigs of RAM, Audio drive = 500gig Hitachi with 16 meg cache, upgraded video card from Apple. Apogee Ensemble for my soundcard with latest firmware and software. Note - the Ensemble's been working great with my Dual 800 for several months now.

I've spent the last 5 days or so getting my data over and installing several new plugs (URS A-series, Waves SSL, Sonalksis, Pluggo) and also 3 UAD-e cards to replace my former 2 UAD card in the Dual 800.

Once I got the machine in working condition I started working on some mixes for an LP I'm tracking right now. The new machine immediately started hickup-ing (Core audio "Disk too slow" 10011 errors again and again). My Dual 800 only had these errors occassionally and always related to the UAD cards maxing out and choking Logic. Now that I've got the 3rd card, none of the mixes that are being problematic are even above 80% on the UAD's meter.

I've done extensive searches of the forums here, on the Apple site and also on the Sonikmatter forums and while I see others suffer these issues, none of the suggestions I've read seem to be helping me.

I've tried the following:

1) Deleting of the session undo's and
2) Reorganized memory in Logic
3) Repaired permissions
4) Buffer tested @ lower settings (64) and higher settings (256) with more errors at 256...
5) Tried disabling my airport card, but no better...
6) Unchecked "Larger disk buffer" and had no change.
7) Tried all 3 settings of "Process buffer range" and had the best results (ie: fewest glitches that stopped playback) with the "small" setting. However, I also got some artifacts in playback that I hadn't heard before at this particular setting.
8) Lastly, I tried to switch to the Macpro's internal soundcard to see if performance was better than with the Ensemble. It was far, far worse with "disk too slow" 10011 errors starting almost immediately and with much higher CPU loads.

---

I just sat down and made some observations with a mix that's having many issues making through an entire playback. It's about 20 tracks of audio, lots of UAD plugs (but only around 60-70% usage on the 3 cards) and very light/virtually no use of any native plugs. During normal playback the 4 processors on the Macpro barely get past 15% or so I'd guess for the majority of the song, until automatic/fades kick in or the computer just glitches and the CPU's (2 or more usually) spike hard and then I get the "disk too slow" 10011 error.

Here's the specific times I saw the errors or oddness in the last couple of hours:

1) It seems that in various places in the song, sometimes with more audio in these parts and sometimes with less, the CPU meters are spiking and I'm getting the Core Audio "disk too slow" 10011 error. This might happen several times during the course of playback.

- This is specifically happening during a point in this particular song when there's 5-7 tracks of fades and/or automation. The CPU's seem to spike massively around the time of the fades/automation and then the error occurs.

- Whenever I hit play the Disk I/O in Logic spikes to around 50-75% on all 4 processors.

- CPU load seems somewhat arbitrary within the same song depending on how the playback begins. For instance, starting from the start of this song seems to create low CPU overhead until the song hangs at the same place. However, sometimes if I start the song in the middle of the song or, if I start playback right after the "disk too slow" 10011 error, all 4 CPU's may stay up around 50+% until playback hangs again.

2) Sometimes while resizing windows in Logic I'm getting the "disk too slow" 10011 error.

3) This may or may not be related - I'm hearing drive noise (almost as if the drive were being indexed or something) in my left monitor. This has never happened before...

4) When bouncing to disk a second ago I noticed that only processor #4 was being used and it was hammered. The reason I mention this is that I did a bounce yesterday and it had a nasty glitch in it for the first time in ages... It been a long time since I had to comb through my mixes to see if my computer glitched.

- I also just noticed something odd about bouncing. On the bounce window, every option for bouncing such as "file format," "sample rate," and everything else except for "resolution" is greyed out and cannot be changed. Also, I just tried to create a new bounce in this song and while Logic goes through the motion of bouncing, the bounce is not created in the folder it's assigned to...

Any thoughts of anything else I should be doing? Is there any app on the Mac that would cause constant indexing? If so, is there a way to defeat it? Are the Pluggo plugs evil or prone to causing havoc even if they're not used in a session? Anything obvious I'm missing here?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Lee

[YUGA]

I'm not very sure but I guess Apogee Ensemble is causing the problem as it's still under beta development. You can check if you get any problem with the built-inl sound card.

[infiniteposse]

Thanks Yuga. I gave that a shot but it actually was much worse...

Appreciate the suggestion.

[TonyBelmont]

Take out the UAD's and see how it runs...

[infiniteposse]

Thanks for the feedback Tony. I'm a little fried from troubleshooting and killing the UAD's didn't even cross my mind. It must be dinner time...

Anywho, even without removing them and creating a version of the song without any of the UAD plugs the song played without any crashes. It would appear that the PCI-e cards may be the problem. There may be some magic way to config that works around this, but I don't know what it is yet.

The UAD-1's have been the core of my mixing for a couple of years now, so the thought of weening myself off of them and also having spent $1500 to upgrade to the PCI-e versions is a little hard to swallow...

Is anyone else successfully using a Macpro with 3 PCI-e UAD-1 cards?

Thanks again for the thought Tony. Appreciated.

[TonyBelmont]

Originally Posted by infiniteposse

Thanks for the feedback Tony. I'm a little fried from troubleshooting and killing the UAD's didn't even cross my mind. It must be dinner time...

Anywho, even without removing them and creating a version of the song without any of the UAD plugs the song played without any crashes. It would appear that the PCI-e cards may be the problem. There may be some magic way to config that works around this, but I don't know what it is yet.

The UAD-1's have been the core of my mixing for a couple of years now, so the thought of weening myself off of them and also having spent $1500 to upgrade to the PCI-e versions is a little hard to swallow...

Is anyone else successfully using a Macpro with 3 PCI-e UAD-1 cards?

Thanks again for the thought Tony. Appreciated.

Glad to help.

[yumdrum]

Man, I hope the UADs are not the problem. I am currently running Nuendo 3 on a dual mirrored Mac as well. But as soon as N4 was released in 07 I was all over this same setup.
Bump for anyone with success with this setup.

[infiniteposse]

One last update for the evening. I went back into the song version with all of the UAD-1 plugs enabled and froze those tracks. Playback was then solid as a rock. There were still some live UAD plugs on some busses, but they only ate up about 21% of the 3 UAD's total power, so the system seemed stable. This would lead me to think that there's likely some golden ratio: x% UAD usage and below and Logic's fine and x% UAD usage and above and Logic's going to error out again and again...

I'd love to hear from some folks with similar systems.

Thanks!

[Geert van den Berg]

Can you raise the buffersettings even higher (1024) and then re-test.

Maybe the UAD doesn't work well with buffersettings smaller than 1024.

[Jens]

How did you format your Audio drive?

Had similar problems on A G5 2,5 x 4.

Open disk utility and see if it's "Journaled"...I erased that and went
with the standard "HFS+".. Problem seems to be solved.

J

[infiniteposse]

Geert - I'm going to play more with buffer settings, so I'll check that out. From what I've read online though, many of the faster quad macs perform better with lower buffer settings. We shall see.

Jens - Yup. No journaling on the audio drive.

I emailed Universal Audio last night with a link to this post, so hopefully they can shed some light on what's happening...

Thx.

[Geert van den Berg]

Jens got a point with the 'journaling' though for the latest PT, Digi advices to keep the drives journaled. Could be different for Logic though.

[Mr.HOLMES]

Man, I hope the UADs are not the problem. I am currently running Nuendo 3 on a dual mirrored Mac as well. But as soon as N4 was released in 07 I was all over this same setup.
Bump for anyone with success with this setup.

Interesting I have the "spike" problem since two weeks by now.
I have had no problems for a long time....but my system is faster if take out the PCIe cards...... funny.

I have Mac Pro 2x2.66 GHZ with 4 GB RAM.
My last projects in Logic Audio I could not bring them to an end just with freezing etc...it took me a lot of time.

A part of the official answer by UAD is this and it is playing down the problem in my opinion:

........

At this time we do not have any solutions to offer as we are still trying to understand the issue. It is a high priority and we have been speaking with Apple regarding this problem. As mentioned as of yet we do not have a solution to offer our users...............