I've had an issue happen on a few different computers and was curious if anyone else had experienced this. I'm using the last generation macbook pro (not the unibody) with full memory. I upgraded to snow leopard and mainstage 2 and I while I'm playing I'll suddenly start having the exs sounds drop out after 2 seconds. If I restart it's fine. Does anyone have a solution? I've done all software upgrades.
I have experienced this issue on multiple machines and this is the main reason why I still have to stick with MS1 for use on stage. For the time being, MS2 is just too risky.
Since this is something I am struggling with for quite some time now, I can provide a pretty detailed description of the problem. Here is what I've learned so far:
Occasionally the EXS24 suddenly stops streaming samples from disk. When this happens, all subsequently played samples are only sounding for one or two seconds, then they break up.
In normal use, the issue occurs randomly and unpredictably. There are times when I can play all sorts of patches in MainStage 2 for hours without a problem and then there are times when the EXS24 suddenly stops streaming from disk after just a couple of minutes of using MainStage 2.
When the problem occurs it is rather permanent -- meaning that it affects all samples in all patches of the concert. Neither switching between patches nor pushing the "panic"-button seem to help. Even initializing Core Audio (by applying changes to the I/O buffer size) does not help. You need to restart MainStage 2.
In case the problem has shown up, it takes unusually long to exit the application. After hitting "Quit", you are left with the "spinning beach ball of impending doom" for a couple of minutes, before the program actually quits.
I have observed this problem with several released versions of Mainstage 2 (2.0 / 2.0.1 / 2.1) while MS1 is not affected.
At first, I thought this was specifically related to MainStage 2, but meanwhile I have also experienced it with LogicPro 9 -- so this seems to be a general issue with the EXS24 in its current version. (On the same machine, I never had this kind of problem with MS1/LP8.)
My guess is, that the problem has something to to with the way the system reacts to a situation where samples can't be read from disk in time. I came to that assumption when I noticed that the moment when the problem occurs coincides with the moment when the EXS reports samples "Not Read From Disk In Time" (displayed in the EXS's "Virtual Memory" options window).
Normally, what should happen in this case is, that obviously some dropouts would occur, but after the peak load is gone, the system would continue to work normally. (At least this is how MainStage 1 and Logic 8 behave on my system.) In MainStage 2 however, this situation causes the EXS24 to permanently stop streaming at all -- until you restart the application.
what I've tried so far:
One thing I tried was setting the system to never go to sleep and never to try putting the disk to sleep. This did not have any effect.
Updating to MacOSX 10.6 (clean install on previously formatted disk) and reinstalling Logic Studio did not help. (For other reasons I reverted to 10.5.8 after having tried that)
Updating to the most current versions (MainStage 2.1) did not help.
Also, I thought it might be a good idea to check for possible hardware problems. So I grabbed the DVDs that came with my MacBook Pro and ran the "Apple Hardware Test". I did run the test twice (with the "perform extended test" option checked) and in both cases it reported no issues found. So hardware-wise from what I can tell the machine seems OK.
I am using two different MacBook Pros:
machine A
MacBook Pro 15" (unibody, early 2009, Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1) 2.4 GHz, 4GB, 128GB SSD, OSX 10.5.8
machine B
MacBook Pro 15" (late 2006, Model Identifier: MacBookPro2,2) 2.33 GHz, 3GB, 160GB hard disk, OSX 10.5.8
It seems like machine A is much more prone to the error (but machine B is not immune either). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that this machine uses a solid state disk, but I can only speculate about that.
One other thing I should mention: I don't use any external audio interface. Just the built in headphone output.
I did report all of the above to Apple -- so they definitely know about it. However I don't know whether they have been able to reproduce it in their lab.
I'm desparately waiting for an update to fix this!
Just happened to me too. midi still working (receiving from triggers), patches changing fine, but no exs sounds all of a sudden.
Then I went to my one patch that uses "playback" and triggered the playback sample and exs sounds kicked back in. Could mean something?
Playback is so sluggish with my triggers, that I only use it for one patch where I need to kick on and off a sound effect that is not groove based. Perhaps i'll now use playback it to kick start exs when it bails.
that1guy wrote:
Just happened to me too. midi still working (receiving from triggers), patches changing fine, but no exs sounds all of a sudden.
We need to be careful not to mix up several separate issues in this thread.
When 'kazooman2' started this topic, his description of the problem was, that sounds stop playing about 2 seconds into the sample. So it's not as if the EXS would be completely silent. It rather goes into a state of only playing the beginning of samples.
'Irizzo2001' is also very specifically describing this situation, as am I.
It is highly likely that this is an issue directly related to disk streaming / virtual memory, since the EXS is basically still working, but it only plays the initial portions of the samples (the parts which have been pre-loaded into RAM).
So did this issue ever get resolved???
I am having the same problem on both my Mac Pro and Macbook Pro!
Do I have to reload Mainstage 1 and will it read a Mainstage 2 file?
I can't believe this has been going on for this long and Apple has not addressed the problem!
No, as usual, Apple just keeps dropping the ball on this one. I sent them my concert files and uploaded them to apple supports FTP, and they were able to re-create the problem and told me it was a but that would probably be fixed in the next update. That was a very very very very long time ago, and No update has been released since.
lrizzo2001 wrote:
I sent them my concert files and uploaded them to apple supports FTP, and they were able to re-create the problem and told me it was a but that would probably be fixed in the next update.
Oh, at least they were able to recreate it. This may sound weird, but to me that's actually good news. If they at least acknowledge that there is in fact a bug that needs to be fixed, it means that I can get my hopes up again.
The sad thing is that there is no official statement -- like e.g. a knowledge base article. In my opinion, a "pro app" not only needs "pro"-features, but also "pro"-support.
It's really sad -- and MS2 is on the market for well over a year now!
I have the same problem with MS 1
I spent so much time in trying to solve that "exs sound stops suddenly" problem.
Some have it, some dont. If you have it, there is by now no solution for that but one: stop using the exs.
For longer samples I switched to ultrabeat, so if I want to fire longer samples I use ultrabeat as a sample player. I got the idea from
in some cases, it may help to load samples into physical memory. i've done live shows where the disk could not read because the stage volume interfered with the disk's ability to read.
if you have extra physical memory, try loading your sample file onto a virtual volume (in memory) using:
this will stream samples 'from disk' - although the disk is RAM. it should have 0 (disk i/o) issues reading samples directly from memory.
Interesting thought. But in case you really do have sufficient physical memory to fit all your samples into RAM, there wouldn't be any need to stream anything at all. You could just go ahead and disable virtual memory in the exs preferences. Then all samples would load completely to RAM anyway.
rainoarthur wrote:
I have the same problem with MS 1
I spent so much time in trying to solve that "exs sound stops suddenly" problem.
Some have it, some dont. If you have it, there is by now no solution for that but one: stop using the exs.
I can remember that I also did experience samples suddenly breaking up in MS1 once or twice. However I think this was a different issue because when it happened, it always was a singular occurrence. All subsequently played samples were playing normally again.
In my experience the issue with MS2 is different in the way that once it has happened, it is persistent: none of the subsequent samples play normally -- all break up. This lasts until you restart the application.
@rainoarthur: Are you certain that what you experienced with MS1 was also exactly the same in this respect? (I mean in the way that the exs enters some sort of permanent "state of shock" until you restart MS)
