Mainstage playback failure during a gig, help!

That is scary stuff! When you are performing live, I can't think of anything worse than having the whole thing go down. This is one of those problems where you can only speculate on the cause, and then have to poke at it. It would be nice to be able to get a failure every time so you can isolate the root cause!

What is odd is that everything worked great at your practices. And its also odd that the problem happened in exactly the same place. Makes me think it was hard drive, audio file, or Playback problem. What was different at the gig, did anything change??

Is either your MainStage CPU or memory meter running close to it's limit? If so, consider trimming things back in the way of channel strips, instruments, and/or plug-ins.

This is a long-shot and doesn't really match your symptoms, but how is your Edirol interface powered? Via a bus off of the computer, or via external power? I have run into some odd failures when running MainStage that seemed to be related to power to my audio interface at a venue (a brownout or surge). I now have my interface connected to both Firewire bus and external power, and plan on buying a good AC conditioner with battery backup. In my case, the symptom was loss of audio (audio interface cut out), though. Much less likely, in your case.

Did anything at all change on your computer system, or were any programs running at the same time as MainStage. I'd do routine maintenance to your system using whatever tools you have available (Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, etc). Corrupt preference file? Disk permissions?

A hard drive problem could create a problem when streaming or reading audio files. And, make double sure your Playback tracks are not corrupt and play ok in different applications. Their are utilities to check your drive sectors, etc.

I'm shooting in the dark.

I seem to be getting a lot of out of sync issues with playback. I'm not sure why it works sometimes and it doesn't on certain occasions. I have 8 playback channels working at a time, and it's hit a miss with Mainstage. I'm terrified of playing out with this thing. Should I reduce the number of tracks with the playback plug-in?

Hi Ferocho - this is a little off topic for the thread (apologies to the original poster), but I have been using multiple playback channels for a long time now, and never had any syncing problems. Check out this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2546658&tstart=0

there may be something here that can help.

Cheers

Hello Unicorn Power

In fact, I create my playback channels at set level (in my set-up, each set is a song, rather than each patch). Then I create multiple patches within each set for all the sounds I will be using in the song - that way I can switch patches and the playback keeps playing. Also, all the settings for my playback tracks (pan, volume, eq, fx) are made at set level, and remain constant for each of the patches within that set.

In other words, I mix my playback as required, then have total freedom to play around with my live instrument and vox sounds within each song. Also, it means I can route any of the playback tracks wherever I want - so, for example, if I want a click track playing only on my drummer's monitor, I simply create an audio file of the click, load it up into a playback channel at set level, then route it to the relevant output on my interface.

You can also reduce CPU usage by judicious use of sends to aux channels - which is much easier to manage if you use sets to represent songs, rather than patches.

Hope that helps

Message was edited by: littleeden

Thanks littleden. I'm going to try your system today (very ingenious), I hope that fix my issues. I never thought of having each playback track on a different patch. Do you use any particular template for the layout?

Ferocho - hang on, before you try it out, please read my more recent post replying to Unicorn Power - I don't put my playback tracks on separate patches, I put them in separate channel strips at the 'Set'level. Each set is one song, and the patches in each set are just the sounds I use for my live instruments and vocal.

Oh, I see. And you never have issues with playback files going out of sync? I have all my files bounced using logic (all with markers and with the exact same length) and Mainstage behavior is erratic at times. If I play the song the first time, it goes without a glitch, but if for some reason i stopped playback and click return to the beginning of the song, sometimes the files don't play in sync. It's a very strange thing.

Since the play button is associated with the first playback channel strip, I wonder if that can be the issue (even though all of them are in the same group). At this point, I think I'm going to create just one playback channel and separate the left and right channels with my instruments. Having only one file, it would be impossible for it to get out of whack. In the meanwhile I'm sending a report to Apple and see if they find a solution to this. After checking on the boards, I realized that I'm not the only one having this issue.

Hmm, that's a puzzle - I'd say there's something else going on there, as I have been doing regular gigs and reheasing for 18 months now using the set-up I describe, and I've never once had a problem with tracks going out of sync. Sorry I can't shed any more light on it.

Hmm, that's a puzzle - I'd say there's something else going on there, as I have been doing regular gigs and reheasing for 18 months now using the set-up I describe, and I've never once had a problem with tracks going out of sync. Sorry I can't shed any more light on it.

The only thing that occurs to me is that I never try to sync up mainstage with my audio other than checking the attributes tab for each set and changing the tempo to the match the tempo I used in Logic when creating my audio file. I know people have had sync problems, for example when trying to use MS's internal metronome to generate click tracks - personally if I need a click track I just make one as an audio file and load it up in playback.

Another thought has just occurred - what version of MS are you guys using? The reason I ask is that I was reminded by another thread that the upgrade to 2.1.1 cured a number of other niggling little problems for me - worth a shot, if you haven't already. Also, RAM may be an issue if you are running a lot of playbacks together, as MS loads all the tracks into RAM at the same time - so if you are using AIFFs for your playbacks, try saving them as MP3s instead. May be barking up the wrong tree, but you never know.

Those are good suggestions. I have the latest version of Mainstage and I use a playback track for the tempo (and I have the same tempo on each patch/song). Memory issues would explain why it happens sometimes and not others, I have 2Gb of RAM...
How do you link your play button to the playback channel strip? Did you create your layout and connections from scratch?

Hi,

Even tough I cannot really help you, I´d like to post my similar problem here.
I use Mainstage since nearly 2 years live on stage in addition to my Yamaha S90ES. I never really had a problem with it.
Until I had to play a rather long sample with Mainstage. First, I played this sample back with the help of the EXS 24. It worked for a long time, and I never had problems at home or while rehearsing with it. Suddenly during a gig the EXS did not finish playing this sample. It started the first second or so, but than the sound did cut off. What a nightmare on stage!! I investigated on this and found out, that obviously the EXS played back what was in the RAM and could not play the rest of the sample, which it streams from the disk.
So I loaded this sample into Kontakt 3. I am not quiet sure, but the next gig or so I think, it worked but not flawlessly. There were some crackles, in the sample. Well, not really ugly crackles as you know them from when the Latency is too low, it was more like dropping out Audio for a very short time.
So my last solution now is to load this sample/audiofile into the Playback Plugin. This works so far for me - But I am warned now and won´t be surprised if audio cuts off. But what I notice is, there is a delay when hitting the play button to start the Playback Plug-in. In my particular case not a big deal, but when it comes to play in time with the drums a no go!
Conclusion: Playing back longer audio samples, or audio files in Mainstage does not work 100% reliable - at least for me. I don't what it is, but just like in your case, this problem only occurred to me live on stage. Maybe it´s the heat or the vibration (Harddisk!) on stage, that does do no good to the Computer. I don't know.
If I run Mainstage at home for hours and hours, for testing everything,I never had a problem. Only on stage...
Any thoughts are welcome!

Myand

P.S.: By the way I run Mainstage 2.1.1

Hi Ferocho

I created my layout by adapting one of the basic templates (sorry - it's a while ago, and I can't remember which), but it's now highly customised for me. All you do is drag a few big buttons onto your layout. Then to map them, you go to the edit screen, click on the first button, you then check the tab marked 'unmapped', which should bring up a list of your playback channel strips (amongst other stuff). Select the first one PB channel, then select 'Playback', then 'Transport', and finally select the action you want (for me, I've mapped one button to 'Play/Stop (from start)', another to Play/Stop (Current Position)' and the third to 'Cycle' - which you will find under 'Play Options' rather than 'Transport'.

To then have this controlled by a MIDI foot pedal, or whatever, go to the Layout screen, check the relevant button, click on the 'Learn' button, and simply stomp on the appropriate switch on your Midi foot pedal. Oh yeah, then don't forget to 'Save' 😉

Hi myand

The problem with the delay when you hit the playback button pretty much identifies this as a RAM issue, I believe. When I first used Mainstage, I put all my songs (40 or so) into one concert, and I had exactly that problem. On the advice of Apple I cured this by breaking up my set-list into a number of smaller concerts. It's a bit of a pain to load up a new concert every so often during a gig, but I can live with it.