Imic And Dp4. Options

[ghant]

Im trying to get the iMic to work with DP4. DP4 sees the iMic and I can select it but I dont get anything in the track. The level doesnt move. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks.

[Station X]

Hello ebuddy,

Sounds like we're on the same page with DP4.x. The only real problems I'm having are occasional processor spikes and sometimes the audio gets garbled - pulses of distortion during playback - pops and cracks. This is usually after running other apps that access the core services/audio drivers. I don't usually have these problems with 4.0 or 4.01 if I restart and use only DP. To be fair, some of my projects are very messy and have a ton of soundbites, splices, fades, etc... I really need to do some housecleaning. I'm sure that would help. Regardless, after almost three months of using DP4 I've only had two crashes and very few problems. Pretty slick.

There are many glitches mentioned at unicornation but, with so many intangibles involved (users, system configurations, hardware, etc...) I take each with a grain of salt. The one glitch I have experienced, MOTU confirmed and I have yet to hear anyone else mention is this - when I open my 3.11 projects in DP4 some of my effect settings are lost - particularly EQ settings... which is a bad thing. MOTU said they were aware of this and working on a fix. I've also had the "skipping" audio output problem that has been mentioned by others when I use 4.01 with the iMic and the Propagamma driver - and no combination of buffer settings, disk repair, core settings or program settings helps. I will take a look at my ins and outs to make sure they match - thanks for the tip. I've been doing mostly mixing, not recording, with DP4.

The major turnaround for me with DP4 was when I moved my audio files from an external 5200rpm firewire drive to a new internal 7200 ATA drive. Sorry, by the way, I'm using a G4 466, 1GB of RAM, 10.2.6 and a lot of peripherals. I won't bother listing the peripherals since I'm not having many notable performance problems with DP4. Moving my audio files to the ATA drive fixed 99 percent of my problems. And a note, the files on my firewire drive were already defragged when I moved them.

I did watch/listen to iTunes and DP4 have a fist fight last week though. I forgot that iTunes was running in the background, launched DP4 and the fur flew.

A random note: the processor bar in DP4 is very pretty but I'm not sure that it's accurate. In general, it does not match up (on my machine) with the Apple Process Viewer's take on processor usage. I'm not sure that the two are in any way related, isolated to my set-up or should yield the same readings... but it makes one think.

I agree with your I/O statement as well. With DP3.11 I had to nudge things around quite a bit. With DP4, newly recorded material seems to land right where it should. I recorded an electronic drum track, played it back with the midi version still on and it was right on the money. That, was sweet.

I think MOTU is in hell right now trying to get DP4 up to speed. I've been a fan of theirs for a long time - still have floppies of the DP version that I ran on my SE/30 - and I'm hanging tough. They've always come through in the past and I believe they will come through with DP4. The corporate heads may have made some bad decisions but I believe the people doing the actual work are rock solid. We're all, to one degree or another, in uncharted waters with OS X. I'm just thrilled not to have to boot into OS9 anymore. OS9 was an excellent system but we're just not there anymore. Time to move on.

This email turned into a book so off I go. Good luck with all your endeavors.

Rock and Roll (with layered acoustics - D-18)