Why is my PRV suddenly behaving so sluggishly?

[OutrageProductions]

I'm not knocking it. Bootcamp works fairly well most of the time. I spent 22 years from Apple System 1 (1984) through Mac OS 9 running a large Macintosh network in studios. For personal reasons (and I got my MSEE using WinTel machines) I will never touch an Apple product again. 

Silly questions; have you cold booted the machine?

Does it happen on every project? 

Single monitor?

Edited December 6, 2023 by OutrageProductions

[Keni]

55 minutes ago, OutrageProductions said:

I'm not knocking it. Bootcamp works fairly well most of the time. I spent 22 years from Apple System 1 (1984) through Mac OS 9 running a large Macintosh network in studios. For personal reasons (and I got my MSEE using WinTel machines) I will never touch an Apple product again. 

Silly questions; have you cold booted the machine?

Does it happen on every project? 

Single monitor?

I getcha. I’m not a mac fan either though as a computer tech I’ve done support/repairs/installs fir a few companies including supporting pg&e and pac bell. So I had to be fluent in each.

But I was gifted these powerhouse (each of them cost my friend over $10k new) it was impossible to refuse.

 I have become far below poverty level (government assessment) these days. Made it a really easy decision. I couldn’t come close to this power myself. Only downside on the trashcan is the lack of multi-drive internal setup, so I do occasionally feel the drag running anything from the USB3 external. The thunderbolt 2 drives are a smidgen better, hut nothing to write home about. Trashcan... very appropriate for more than it’s appearance as they created a dead end flagship in this machine. I love the prior dual xeon 6 core processors @3.06 in a normal mac pro tower with 4 internal ssd's... A screamer but had me trapoed at win8.1 which I didn’t mind until I couldn’t get new software running that required win10.

Now I’m trapped at win10! 🎃

[Bristol_Jonesey]

Ok, let's try a different approach.

What happens if you bypass all Fx in the control bar?

[Keni]

4 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Ok, let's try a different approach.

What happens if you bypass all Fx in the control bar?

Thanks Jonesey...

 

I'll try that in a little while. Just finished breakfast.

i did try removing all tracks except the superior drummer and the vsampler used in all this.

Problem still the same after save/close/reopen...

A thought just came to me though. One possibly very significant item.

This song has a number of meter changes! Maybe that or the crazy editing I did to figure out and map thr meter changes as the song evolved. Good possibility that either having such a map, or the sloppy way it was implemented? That’s really sounding plausible now?

Maybe I’m not remembering, but is there any place to see an overview of the meter changes?

[Bristol_Jonesey]

Sure, just goto View > Meter/Key

But I doubt this is the cause of yout problem

[John Vere]

At the top of the track inspector is where you find the different views for it like pro channel, arranger and the tempo. It’s a metronome icon 

[David Baay]

I'm pretty sure GUI Throttle Mode (a.k.a. CPU Conservation Mode) activated by Pause is not the issue here. It's only active during playback, reducing UI updates (mainly meters, Now counter and Now cursor motion) to approximately once per second. If you were to try moving notes in the PRV during playback (which I'm guessing is not the case here), there would be that slight delay in the UI update but not "many seconds of the screen slowly flashing and re-adjusting itself trying to get to it's goal" as described.

 

[David Baay]

20 hours ago, Keni said:

What's weighing the system down with so much frozen? Why is PRV behaing as if there's more load than there is?

Try toggling the audio engine off by the button in the transport module. If the problem persists, it's not load-related. With all the other tracks frozen, it shouldn't be RAM-related, either. I would sooner suspect  some issue with the interoperability of the CW with your video driver. Have you added/updated any hardware/software/firmware/drivers  around the time this happened? If it's only this one project, try to identify anything unusual about it, and maybe start stripping down a copy of it.

[Keni]

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

At the top of the track inspector is where you find the different views for it like pro channel, arranger and the tempo. It’s a metronome icon 

Thanks, but no. That's the tempo track and displays tempo changes. These are not tempo changes. The tempo remains the same but the song changes from 3/4 to 4/4 and even to 1/4 3 times! 😉

It's the number of beats in a measure...

[Keni]

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

I'm pretty sure GUI Throttle Mode (a.k.a. CPU Conservation Mode) activated by Pause is not the issue here. It's only active during playback, reducing UI updates (mainly meters, Now counter and Now cursor motion) to approximately once per second. If you were to try moving notes in the PRV during playback (which I'm guessing is not the case here), there would be that slight delay in the UI update but not "many seconds of the screen slowly flashing and re-adjusting itself trying to get to it's goal" as described.

 

Thanks David...

 

I don't think so either. Especially seeing that so far it's impossible to find the pause key on my system due to mac/pc differences as well as keyboard brand unusualness..

I'm more convinced than ever that it's related to the meter changes as I can see how the PRV would need to interpret such.

I removed all tracks except for the vsampler midi/audio tracks and bypassed all remaining fx.... The problem still persists.

In none of my other project using this VSampler plugin with the same bass loaded including projects with nearly identical instrumentation brands/models

If this is the case I can easily live with it for now as I've already weathered the tedious editing for this song and all that remains are vocals with a guitar solo.... No more midi work planned and I rarely do such meter mapping... 😉

 

[Bristol_Jonesey]

Do a "save as" to a new location. Make sure "copy audio with project" is checked

Same problem? Ok, delete all your meter/key changes and report back

[Keni]

33 minutes ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Do a "save as" to a new location. Make sure "copy audio with project" is checked

Same problem? Ok, delete all your meter/key changes and report back

will try asap... something came up requiring my attention

 

[Keni]

5 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Sure, just goto View > Meter/Key

But I doubt this is the cause of yout problem

We will see some time today.

 

Thanks for the pointer. I'm surprised I didn'[t think to look there but that's exactly what I was looking for. I remember it but couldn't remember where!

I'll review it as well as test removing all the meter changes and report back...

 

[Keni]

5 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Sure, just goto View > Meter/Key

But I doubt this is the cause of yout problem

Just tried a quick test deleting the meter changes without saving etc. No diff there but I'll do a full test in a while when I'm not multi-tasking others' problems simultaneously...

 

[Keni]

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

Try toggling the audio engine off by the button in the transport module. If the problem persists, it's not load-related. With all the other tracks frozen, it shouldn't be RAM-related, either. I would sooner suspect  some issue with the interoperability of the CW with your video driver. Have you added/updated any hardware/software/firmware/drivers  around the time this happened? If it's only this one project, try to identify anything unusual about it, and maybe start stripping down a copy of it.

Thanks for the confirmation David. Exactly my thinking.

I took it all the way down to only the single plugin in a quick test and it is still problematic.

Next going to remove all meter changes, save, reopen

then remove all other tracks as well. Repeat close open

 

I'll report asap

[Bristol_Jonesey]

If all else fails, I'd try to re-create the project using your existing audio & midi clips.

[Keni]

18 minutes ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

If all else fails, I'd try to re-create the project using your existing audio & midi clips.

Big ouch!

Luckily not necessary. Though it was painful while I was working, I didn't report this until after I'm essentially finished with my MIDI work on this song other than any necessary tweaks at final mix. So I really don't "need" to solve this to work, only to understand why it's happenning and how I might avoid it happening again...

 

So I may do a quickie version of this idea starting a new project (empty) importing all tracks as frozen audio except loading a new instance of the VSampler I've been using for the testing and then copy the MIDI track for that one (after removing all the meter change info)