Mainstage playback failure during a gig, help!

We played a gig at a festival last night and had a bit of a Mainstage disaster, the playback just stopped during one of the songs, we tried to play the song again and it stopped in exactly the same place. We also had a problem in a different song where the playback of 2 tracks was not synchronised correctly, on restarting the song it worked fine. We use this Mainstage Concert in practise every week and have never had a problem, only when we are on stage in front of lots of people! The songs now plays completely fine again.

Just to give a little information about my setup, I am running the latest version of Mainstage (2.1.1). I have every song as a patch, each song has 2 playback plugins, one for drums and one for other sounds so the levels can be adjusted independently, these are linked to start at the same time and basically function as a backing track. On one song I also have an EXS24 plugin which is played with a USB keyboard and some songs have external MIDI to send the MIDI clock to a micro-korg. I should add that the song that failed did not have either of these plugins (EXS24 or external MIDI). I have a USB LINE 6 foot pedal to start and stop the songs and to advance the patches. This is running on a 2.4GHz Mac Book Pro using an Edirol UA-25 audio interface.

If anyone has any idea what could have caused this I'd love to know. We have more gigs coming up and I dread having more intermittent problems that I have no clue how to solve. I find playing gigs fairly stressful as it is, now I have the added fear of Mainstage issues. Any help much appreciated!

Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Aug 16, 2010 11:36 AM

31 replies

myand

Level 1

0 points

Aug 18, 2010 9:07 AM in response to littleeden

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Well as I said, it does not really bother me, that theres a slight delay when I hit the playback button. It does not have to be in time.
But any comments on the problem, that sounds are dropping out or cutting off when loaded into the EXS, Kontakt 3, or maybe even playback?

best regards
myand

Aug 19, 2010 3:13 AM in response to myand

Not really, I'm afraid, except that if you are using up a lot of RAM that may contribute to the other problem - other more tech people may have comments.

Aug 19, 2010 3:32 AM in response to littleeden

.... and then I remembered that Mainstage won't load MP3s, for some reason - maybe if we all submit a request to Apple...

ferocho

Level 1

10 points

Aug 19, 2010 6:01 AM in response to littleeden

littleeden wrote:
.... and then I remembered that Mainstage won't load MP3s, for some reason - maybe if we all submit a request to Apple...

Yes, I was just about to say that...
You know, if they would allow to do playback of MIDI files, that would absolutely take care of all my issues. MIDI files wouldn't take any space and I could connect them to my sound modules. That's a feature I really wish Mainstage had.

Aug 26, 2010 5:29 AM in response to littleeden

A question for littleeden, for your playback are you using .caf or .aiff files? I'm going to try rebuilding my concert using sets for songs instead of patches and would like to use an audio format that is tried and tested.

Aug 26, 2010 11:33 AM in response to Unicorn Power

Hi there - I use AIFFs, and I've not had a problem with them so far (in 18 months or so).

Aug 27, 2010 7:28 AM in response to littleeden

Ok, thanks for the info, think I will use aiffs too, just incase some of the extra information in caf files is confusing things. What bit-depth do you use?

Aug 28, 2010 10:30 AM in response to Unicorn Power

Hello again - the answer is 24 bit at 44.1 Khz sample rate. Hope that helps.

Aug 29, 2010 5:33 AM in response to littleeden

Ok, thanks for your help!

Aug 29, 2010 7:16 AM in response to Unicorn Power

The downside of having the playback strips at the set level seems to be that if your set does not contain any patches (i.e you are only using the set level channel strips) you can't cycle through the set using the patch selector, which means I can't use the patch selector to go through my songs. Is there a set selector?

Sep 3, 2010 7:12 AM in response to Unicorn Power

Actually you can. All you have to do is change the mapping of the appropriate on-screen control. If you highlight the control and click on the tab named (for example) 'next patch' in the edit screen, you should be able to see an option for 'next set' etc.

Cheers

Sep 3, 2010 8:37 AM in response to littleeden

I tried that, but it doesn't like selecting empty sets, eg sets that don't contain any patches. Maybe I was doing something stupid.

Sep 10, 2010 4:24 PM in response to Unicorn Power

hi Unicorn, once u make the set, create a patch under it. i normally make my set consist of a song with playback track, and loopbacks as auxes at the set level, then set up instruments for verse, chorus etc as patches under the set. with regards to syncing issues on multiple playbacks (mainly affects loopback plugin) i found i had no problems when i set the Snap to Off (usually defaults to bar). also be sure that if u are using sync that u set the tempo for each set otherwise playback will sync at the concert level. and set all the plugins u want to sync to be in the same group.

lately i've been splitting up the backing tracks so they don't get too big to handle. once u bounce your midis u may find a lot of repetitive content i your aiff file. so i've started loading the playback into a loopback plugin and muting the various loopbacks at the right time. this minimizes on the need to load large backing tracks i find.

i've been using 48khz aiffs as backing and have noticed less cpu usage, so if u are having cpu issues give that a go and see. also it seems i get better latency times with higher 512kb samples at 48k. btw - when mainstage crashed during your live setup - did your gain on any channels exceed 0db? i find logic really craps itself when that happens. perhaps you dont overload it during practice, which may be why it happened when u went live?

Oct 18, 2010 8:44 PM in response to Unicorn Power

I can't for the life of me trust the Playback Plugin.
Testing it showed not only some delay when triggering the "Play" action, like @myand posted earlier (the "concert transport" itself also has delay: if your concert is stopped and you activate the Beat Count, the first beat takes longer than the following beats), but also if you're not careful using it, you can trigger some seriously buggy events.

At times the Playback Plugins can fall out of sync from each other, even though they have the same settings and belong to the same Group.
So far I couldn't reproduce this issue on purpose.

In my case, I need backing tracks inserted mid-song, so respecting the downbeat is crucial for me.

I'm trying to work out a practical solution with other plugins, samples, entire applications... no luck so far...

ferocho

Level 1

10 points

Oct 19, 2010 4:44 AM in response to footswitch

Footswitch, how many instances of the plugin do you have on your project? I mean the whole project, not just one patch or concert. I ask this because I had the same problem when I tried to load all my songs in one project. Right now I just load one song per project (with 6 backing tracks, each approximately 30 to 50 mb) , it's a pain but it has worked perfectly ever since.
Hope that helps.

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Mainstage playback failure during a gig, help!