Nuendo is making me think about amputating my head

thekeepsake · Post by **thekeepsake** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:40 pm

First, the scenery:

I'm running two different machines. The one I'm more concerned about is a 3.5 mhz pentium d with windows xp pro, 2 gb of ram, fast hard drives, a UAD-1 card, and an M-audio fw410 interface. The other machine is a 3.2 pentium 4 with a lynx card and a benchmark ad/da system with fast drives and 1.5 gb of ram.

Both machines run steinberg nuendo 2.0 with the full line of waves plugins.

For awhile, both machines worked fine. Then, without making any changes to hardware or software, the machines will freeze, stutter, pop, click, and basically sound like some dumb f/x pedal simulating a tremolo during playback. they will make errors during recording and exporting of wav files. What is the cause?

Some other info: process explorer says nuendo is only using 66-73 percent of the cpu, with most of the rest going to the idle process. the meter in nuendo is maxed.

Other weirdness: when I first boot up and open a file, it plays ok. Then it will start acting up like the description above and will not play correctly. Opening another file or closing and reopening Nuendo do not fix the problem.

The problem occurs on mixes from months ago that never had issues as well as new projects.

What's going on?

GooberNumber9 · Post by **GooberNumber9** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 6:44 am

My first thought is digital I/O synch. Are you using any outboard converters or clock sources?

Are your audio hard drives FAT32 or NTFS?

You might try removing things one at a time and see if anything improves. Like remove the UAD-1 and see if that makes a difference, remove the Benchmark, etc. Strip it down as far as possible. Import a stereo audio file and see how that plays.

Also, consider removing non-audio programs, going into the task manager and stopping everything you don't need, uninstalling scanners, printers, cameras, whatever, turn off your network cards, etc. Work slowly and test a lot to see if you can pinpoint something that is related to the problem.

Let us know what you find!

Todd Wilcox

Ryan Silva · Post by **Ryan Silva** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 12:20 pm

I have had plugin's do that to me before. They were courupting project files progressively, after every save. I was useing Vegas 2 then, using Nuendo 2 now with no such troubles. However those symptoms sound very familiar.

I would check all the projects your having problems with, for commonly used plug-ins.

My Vegas projects were forever messed up, but hey that was vegas.

apropos of nothing · Post by **apropos of nothing** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 3:01 pm

Are these machines inet-connected? Have you run a virus/scumware scan on them recently?

farview · Post by **farview** » Sat Jan 13, 2007 11:54 am

I've had certain plugins do that to me.

It could also be that your hard drives are really fragmented, but I doubt it. It sounds more like sync or some plugin jumping up and screwing you.

thekeepsake · Post by **thekeepsake** » Sat Jan 13, 2007 11:50 pm

Update:

Well, on the machine with the pentium D, Norton found a major virus called w32.jeefo and I'm going to have to redo that machine. But I think that probably explains it, so there should be no trouble once I do that.

Luckily, the machines are not networked, and Norton found no similar virus on the machine hooked up to the benchmark/apogee. The hard drives are NTFS. We have stripped the machine down software and hardware wise, no change.

We are using an outboard converter - Benchmark DAC1 for D/A and Apogee AD16x for A/D. We have the clock source set to internal which is performed by our Lynx AES16 PCI card.

Any other suggestions?

qball · Post by **qball** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 6:15 am

Back when I was using Nuendo I had the same thing happen to me, and it seemed to happen over night. The problem was that my hard drive was nearly full. Once I transfered another project to a backup drive, everything worked great.

As a rule, once you reach 50% of your HDD capacity the performance drops at an accelerated rate.

kayagum · Post by **kayagum** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 6:31 am

qball wrote:As a rule, once you reach 50% of your HDD capacity the performance drops at an accelerated rate.

+1. Really worry when you're at 85%+. Are you using an external drive for your tracks?

GCMan · Post by **GCMan** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 10:28 am

Feels good to have a Mac G5!

stinkpot · Post by **stinkpot** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 1:32 pm

I've seen mac's get all messed up and take a big poop too!

thekeepsake · Post by **thekeepsake** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 10:25 pm

kayagum wrote:
qball wrote:As a rule, once you reach 50% of your HDD capacity the performance drops at an accelerated rate.
+1. Really worry when you're at 85%+. Are you using an external drive for your tracks?

I'm using a 20 gb partition of a 200gb sata drive. it's not the system drive. We made the partition for writing audio thinking that would confine the read operations to a smaller space on the drive.

I don't know if that helps or not. Still no luck. Thanks for everyone's help so far.

mrufino1 · Post by **mrufino1** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:35 am

You should have a physically separate hard drive for your audio, not just a partition. With my audio drives, I make 2 partitions on them- the first is small, 20-25 gigs, reserved for the current project I am working on at that moment. The rest of the drive is for projects that are current. I move whatever I am working on to the active partition then move it back to the other when I am done, and also backup to my storage drive each time while the project is active as well.

jeddypoo · Post by **jeddypoo** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 2:38 pm

thekeepsake wrote:First, the scenery:

I'm running two different machines. The one I'm more concerned about is a 3.5 mhz pentium d with windows xp pro, 2 gb of ram, fast hard drives, a UAD-1 card, and an M-audio fw410 interface. The other machine is a 3.2 pentium 4 with a lynx card and a benchmark ad/da system with fast drives and 1.5 gb of ram.

Both machines run steinberg nuendo 2.0 with the full line of waves plugins.

For awhile, both machines worked fine. Then, without making any changes to hardware or software, the machines will freeze, stutter, pop, click, and basically sound like some dumb f/x pedal simulating a tremolo during playback. they will make errors during recording and exporting of wav files. What is the cause?

Some other info: process explorer says nuendo is only using 66-73 percent of the cpu, with most of the rest going to the idle process. the meter in nuendo is maxed.

Other weirdness: when I first boot up and open a file, it plays ok. Then it will start acting up like the description above and will not play correctly. Opening another file or closing and reopening Nuendo do not fix the problem.

The problem occurs on mixes from months ago that never had issues as well as new projects.

What's going on?

yeah, my first inclination here was "fragmented disk" or "virus". When that stuff happens on my Mac, it's almost never to do with CPU power, RAM, or my interface, it's usually that I haven't repaired disk permissions or repaired the ext. drive in too long, or something to that effect.

thekeepsake · Post by **thekeepsake** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:05 pm

Well, it's gone from bad to mindboggling.

I reinstalled Windows XP, all my software, all my drivers. Still the same problem. Ran Norton. Found nothing.

Opened mixes that worked even a day ago. They don't play without crackling or crashing.

Ran defrag. Drives are all below half full and I defragged. No change.

HELP!

longfade · Post by **longfade** » Thu May 10, 2007 10:57 am

Is your PC in ACPI, or Standard mode?

Could it also have to do w/your SATA bus? I've heard of similar problems involving both of those things.

Just a thought....good luck.

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Nuendo is making me think about amputating my head

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