Maschine Plugin Stability (Lack thereof)

Hi everyone,

I run on Windows XP SP3 with 2 gb of RAM, Intel 2.4 Quad-Core.

I have tested the Maschine RTAS and VST plugins in Pro Tools 8, Acid 7 Demo, Reaper and Albeton Live. The plugins is horribly unstable and will freeze or crash any of the DAWs I've tried, and frequently. This happens with both RTAS and VST. On Pro-Tools, PT hangs and I kill the process, but Mascine is still "linked" with the software and the system has to be rebooted because ProTools can't be killed off. Stability with Acid wasn't any better.

I want to run the plugin in a DAW so I can also use Reason at the same time. I'm so frustrated. Not being able to run multiple tools is a complete limitation to creativity. The stand-alone Maschine software is very stable, and Protools 8 and Reason 4 together is a stable combination. If the Maschine plugin is up, I've still got around a gig of free memory - this happens without more than two instruments loaded and no MIDI recorded in either PT or Reason!

Is anyone else going through this misery?

 

have you downloaded the 1.0.3 update?

sowari

 

Yes, I'm running with the latest update. Tonight I dropped PT and spent more time in Live 6.x Lite (M-Audio edition that came with my keyboard) and it appeared a little more stable. I'll keep working with it. It would be nice to narrow it down, but the stand-alone seems by far the most stable.

 

version 1.0.3 should be quite stable in Pro Tools 8 maybe you should contact tech support? But you could try increaing the Latency?

Live 6 is quite an old version in someways, i have a similar version becuase of my purchase of Pro Tools MBox a couple of years ago and it seemed quite stable (on my Macbook) when i last checked....maybe a couple of months ago.

sowari

 

I'm using the last L6 version here myself (6.0.11). I've had zero stability problems.

ew

 

My actual goal in all of this is simply to use Maschine and Reason 4 together, and that requires a DAW. Maybe it's something wrong I've done in Pro Tools with my MIDI clock settings or controllers that invariably causes a lock up. The crash eventually happens when I switch back to PT and click somewhere on the sequencer timeline. Maschine stays loaded in memory and PT can't be force killed (it even complains that the system needs to be rebooted).

In working purely with Reason and Protools in the past I haven't experienced this.

I'll try increasing latency.
---
Here's my Pro-Tools 8 settings:

Hardware: Mbox 2 Mini, internal clock

Playback Engine
HW Buffer Size: 1024 Samples
RTAS Processors: 4
CPU Usage Limit: 85%
DAE Playback Buffer Size: Level 2, Cache Size: Large * (I'll try with these settings altered to Level 1 and Normal)

Peripherals
Synchronization
MTC Reader Port: Any
MTC Generater Port: none

Machine Control
MIDI Machine Control (Master) [unchecked]
MIDI Machine Control Remote (slave)
Enable ID 127

MIDI Controllers
M-Audio Keyboard (Receive From: Axiom 61 In, Send To Axiom 61 out)


MIDI Input enabled is only the Axiom, not the Maschine controller In (yet PT takes control of the MIDI device anyway and Reason 4 can't have at it).


Any suggestions?

 

Today things appear more stable. The fundamental differences are that I REDUCED the latency (smaller buffer and cache sizes as I mentioned I would try as highlighted in my config above in bold), which actually seems to allow the Maschine plugin to run more smoothly.

I'll keep playing with it and see if that is a permanent solution.

 

Of course, just as I wrote this, I crashed and got a Maschine crash log (attached).

 

it is best to send crash logs to tech support with clear descriptions about what you were doing when the crash happened.

sowari

 

The issue with Maschine playing very unstable within my DAW (Pro Tools8) was in my case solved by lowering the H/W buffersize in the playback engine in PT

1024 => 512
using 3 processor out of 4 (I'm on a quadcore pc)
CPU use set to 85%

Now Maschine is running smootly witin Pro Tools. So what already was said before: Do some changes in the Playback engine (found under SETUP in PT) and it will work fine.
Hope this helps

Dutchmountain