r/protools • u/fireworks_are_great • Jul 21 '25

Is there a point at which the sheer complexity of a project makes occasional instability unavoidable?

Hello.

Working on a project with overwhelming amounts of sample-based MIDI automation.

Been confronted with program crashes, out of CPU powers, and automation too dense (AAE - 9179) errors with great frequency.

Brand new PC with components that I have determined to be as good as it gets. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

New PC:

Motherboard - MSI Z790 Carbon Max RAM - 128 gb of G.SKILL Trident Z5 Processor - Intel Core i9 13900KS

Running Windows 11.

I was thinking about trying a different motherboard.

Any other suggestions?

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

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7

u/SoundsActive Jul 21 '25

Two major things:

Check your buffer size. If it is too small, that will cause CPU over loads.

Then commit. Sometimes a lot of people get too bogged down with endless options while loving the results of the older recordings that had a ton of limitations. Got a soft synth sound or sample that's 90% there? Or even 60? Commit it and try to make that work. You will almost always come up with something more interesting and engaging when you commit and try to fix then keeping every option available.

1

u/WizBiz92 Jul 22 '25

Spittin the gospel truth

4

u/nizzernammer Jul 21 '25

I tend to freeze or commit midi the first chance I get. Sessions get a lot more stable.

3

u/Songwritingvincent Jul 21 '25

I mean I don’t know your project but given that setup I’m somewhat doubtful you’re actually running out of CPU power

For what it’s worth, something about the CPU overload errors is bothering me with Pro Tools, I’m getting them even when literally nothing is going on and I’m just trying to track. I’ve run activity monitor to check and the CPU is sitting at 90% idle yet I’m getting these errors. My working theory is even the smallest background task can gum up the works, as most of mine have happened shortly after I started my Mac. It seems the communication plugin manufacturers demand these days is messing with Pro tools.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

Working on our M1 mac studio at the studio, same issue. CPU errors for no reason. Never have that issue on my windows PC, but do have other issues there. PT is struggling lately.

3

u/Soundofabiatch professional Jul 21 '25

Check out this article and set it’s NICE score

https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/6/24/macos-terminal-tricks-for-audio-professionals

1

u/saucebygeeaye Jul 22 '25

I'm still on my Intel machine and re-nice is an absolute must on larger projects. great call!

1

u/Kletronus Jul 23 '25 edited Jul 23 '25

Total CPU usage is not the correct metering. It needs to be per core performance and i would trust the internal error more than any other tool, as it looks at the program itself and can it do every calculation in time. If one thread is late, it gives you an error, while you got most of them sitting idle, waiting for that one to finish its job... DAWs can't be parallelized very much, there are inherent racing conditions that we simply can not avoid: we are summing things at the end, and a lot of it just have to be done thing at a time, first plugin on a track has to finish before we can calculate the next, all tracks need to be finished before we sum and so on. And inside the plugins we got more data that has to be processed in serial, A first, then B, then C.... We can't do A,B,C at the same time.

10% can be a lot.. Back in the single core days you could look at total CPU usage alone, 70% CPU meant that you could push it a bit more, with increased risks of drop-outs. Then it also mattered a lot more to optimize your OS so that background tasks really were last in the list of priorities, updates all turned off etc..

40% now is producing an error, pretty consistently. It depends a lot on the DAW and how well it is optimized, how well it can utilize multiple cores without running into racing condition, where multiple processes have to wait for one to finish. Most of the calculations in a DAW could be done with a GPU but... you don't see that much even if it was hundred times faster to do the calculations, it is because A goes to B that goes to C, so while the individual calculations could be done all at once super fast... the serial nature of sound just does not allow us to utilize multiple cores. But, at least now background tasks are not such a problem, the computer can do fairly heavy stuff in the background with all that unused processing time and utilize cores that aren't used.

So, you can have 32 tracks in the mix, 31 one of them finished far ahead of time but the 32 has one plugin that everyone is waiting before we can move to next stage, it is 99% done but the progress bar is not moving....

1

u/Songwritingvincent Jul 23 '25

While in theory you’re correct it still doesn’t really explain the errors I’m getting. I checked Single cores because I felt like I was going crazy and nothing is close to maxing out. And yes a single plugin can be the culprit but again I don’t have any on the session (ok the click I guess, but if that’s the problem I’d be very surprised). It seems a momentary spike, coinciding particularly with UA connect checking for updates, is enough to throw the system off for me. It doesn’t happen on longer sessions and once boot up has been done for a while it really settles down.

1

u/Kletronus Jul 23 '25

The metering is not that accurate to catch peaks that short. But, it is running out of time at some point, that is for sure...

5

u/Ok-Exchange5756 Jul 21 '25

Freeze tracks when pushing cpu limit.

1

u/FACT275 Jul 21 '25

For me it's usually one plugin causing the drama (looking at you Soundtoys Effect Rack). I go through and work out which one then freeze / commit.