Audio Issue with V

So, I was rolling happily along on version 5, using the SP Casavant with no issues at all. I decided to go ahead and convert from the HASP dongle to iLok, which also was a very smooth process. I then went to the Impulse Response reverb screen, to try out one of the convolution reverbs. I selected one, and all seemed well on the Casavant. Since I had converted to iLok, I now tried to load the Hereford samples. Again, all seemed well with the load, but I could get no audio. Everything seemed to be working (Midi, etc) but no audio. Unloading the organ began my trip through multiple error messages, reboots, reloads, restores. I now have an unusable system. I did a reinstall, which helped somewhat with all the various error messages (all related to CoreAudio). The included St. Anne's audio starts long after the organ loads, the Casavant is very distorted (when I can get it to work at all), with pops, crackles and hisses, no sound from the Hereford, and error messages sometimes when loading or unloading organs, such as this:

Could not stop the CoreAudio audio device 'UltraLite-mk4'. Please try re-booting the computer. (Operating system message: AudioHardwareBadDeviceError, code: 560227702 hex: 21646576.)

Message code (for diagnostic purposes): 5202

I'm tired right now, so tomorrow I intend to delete everything and install from scratch.

System is Mac, with the UltraLite Mk4. Small and simple with stereo pair and sub. I can't help thinking I bumped something else on one of the screens when I was messing with the Impulse Response reverb, but I don't think that should have led me down this path. If I only hadn't gone to iLok, I could reinstall 4, but too late to cry about that.

[mdyde]

Hello Ray,

When you (most recently) installed v5, did you uninstall and delete v4 completely (as covered in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17850 )? In particular, if the v4' /Applications/Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ' folder wasn't completely deleted before the v5 installer ran, then it can result in a partly-corrupted v5 installation, which is likely to behave strangely.

If so:

- If Hauptwerk isn't running, does your UltraLite Mk4 play audio correctly from other applications (e.g. iTunes)?

- If you try launching Hauptwerk via a spare 'Hauptwerk (alt config N)' desktop alias, does that play audio through it correctly (e.g. with St. Anne's and default settings)?

Thanks.

Hello Ray,

When you (most recently) installed v5, did you uninstall and delete v4 completely (as covered in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17850 )? In particular, if the v4' /Applications/Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ' folder wasn't completely deleted before the v5 installer ran, then it can result in a partly-corrupted v5 installation, which is likely to behave strangely.

If so:

- If Hauptwerk isn't running, does your UltraLite Mk4 play audio correctly from other applications (e.g. iTunes)?

- If you try launching Hauptwerk via a spare 'Hauptwerk (alt config N)' desktop alias, does that play audio through it correctly (e.g. with St. Anne's and default settings)?

Thanks.

Hi Martin,

Yes, I deleted everything 'Hauptwerk'.

Yes, the UltraLite Mk4 plays music perfectly from other apps and the web.

I started from an alternate config, and it did not work correctly either.

Please note that my install was working perfectly until I did three things (I know I should only do one thing at a time). I was trying out convolution reverb, moved from the HASP to iLok, and installed an encrypted organ.

I think my next move is to do an uninstall, delete anything 'Hauptwerk' left, and reinstall from scratch. I will still restore my settings from version 4 backup, which I hope does not reintroduce a problem. I really don't want to have to redefine all my Launchpad buttons for all the organs, plus lose all my presets.

Ray

[mdyde]

Thanks, Ray.

Please note that my install was working perfectly until I did three things (I know I should only do one thing at a time). I was trying out convolution reverb, moved from the HASP to iLok, and installed an encrypted organ.

Any settings changes in Hauptwerk would *only* affect the configuration (desktop short-cut) that you were using, so trying the 'spare' config should eliminate the previous settings changes you made as the source of the problem.

Installing an organ should have no effect at all on any other organ (e.g. St. Anne's).

Also, no dongles or licences should be able to have any effect on audio per-se -- they just determine whether things are able to load or not.

In your 'spare' config, please try using 'General settings | General configuration wizard' to reset everything to defaults, then select the Mac's built-in output as the audio device, then load St. Anne's, then use the Organ settings | Organ configuration wizard' to reset all settings to defaults.

Does the audio then work properly?

Also, what version of macOS are you using? Thanks.

OK, I'm stumped. MacOS Catalina.
Deleted Hauptwerk completely. Installed again from scratch. Reset audio, routed to internal speakers. Started St. Anne's. Worked perfectly. Unloaded organ. Loaded St. Anne's. Worked perfectly. Changed audio routing to the MOTU UltraLite Mk4. Loaded St. Anne's. Worked perfectly. Unload organ. Perfect. Load organ. Works. Unload, worked. Restored from Ver. 4 backup. Loaded St. Anne's. Works fine.

Now the fun. Loaded my Casavant. No audio. Attempted unload, error message regarding 'can't stop audio device'. Tried to change to internal speakers failed due to can't access CoreAudio. If I had to guess, it seems that when I changed to iLok, an event now occurs which I would call a 'core walker' (binary boots), although I can't believe that MacOS would allow that. I'm tempted to re-install version 4 and run it in 'evaluation' mode to see what would happen.

I guess I'll sit here and think a while first.

After consideration, I believe this is a Hauptwerk V bug. Before the HASP to iLok conversion, I was able to run version 5 and load St. Anne's and the Casavant, swapping them back and forth repeatedly with success. Following the conversion to iLok, I can no longer load the Casavant (or any other organ). When installing Hauptwerk, and without loading any other organ, St. Anne's works as expected. I can load and unload that organ repeatedly, feeding either the UltraLite or internal speakers without issues. My UltraLite-Mk4 also plays music from other sources correctly. It seems that loading another organ to Hauptwerk causes an over-write to an area of the Hauptwerk load module (pardon me for using mainframe terminology), preventing use of either the UltraLite or internal audio.

System is:
MacOS Catalina 10.15.2
MacBookPro 2017 14,3
Quad-core Intel Core I7 at 2.9 Ghz 16Gb Ram
Thunderbolt 3 interface to OWC dock providing USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports
MOTU UltraLite-Mk4
2 Behringer B2031A studio monitors
Behringer Sub-woofer

iLok Cloud (I think that could have an impact as opposed to the iLok dongle)

Again, I believe I have isolated this to one change which seems to be the conversion from HASP to iLok.
For now, it seems I'm stuck with just the St. Anne's. . I sure wish there was a way to reverse that conversion...

I have done further testing. I loaded the Casavant but adjusted it to use as little memory as possible (16-bit, minimized all samples, and did not load rear samples). Hauptwerk has no issues and this organ works correctly. I then kept adding so as to use more memory and eventually had no audio output (although Hauptwerk indicated I still had over 4GB available). When I tried to unload the organ, I received the message (as in my first post above) regarding the inability to stop the CoreAudio device and I should reboot the computer, which I did NOT do at this time. I tried to load the St. Anne's and got a message about not being able to read the list of CoreAudio devices and I should reboot the computer, which I again did NOT do. Closed Hauptwerk, opened it up and loaded St. Anne's with no issues. It played perfectly. I then unloaded the organ and that worked. Next I loaded the Casavant adjusting the ranks again to reduce the space requirements. It loaded perfectly. I swapped back and forth between the two organs with no issues. Next I installed and loaded the Hereford with my previous (V4) settings and it would not work. Loaded it adjusting memory usage and the Hereford works fine. Note that I've never rebooted during all of this. Because of these tests, I feel very strongly there is a memory usage bug within Version 5 (memory leak?). I've run complete diagnostics on the computer (just to make sure) and there are no memory issues found. This issue resides within Hauptwerk Version 5. I should also mention that Hauptwerk reports about 1 GB less memory available on start up than version 4 did but I chalked that up to the fresh install on this computer producing more optimized code (much newer CPU's) since version 4 was installed on an older computer and just restored to the new one.

I feel alone out here in the wilderness since I am apparently the only person with this issue. But, at least I can use the organ again, even though I've had to reduce the realism settings to very low levels. I have organs which I cannot reduce the size enough to use, which makes me sad, but at least I have some working instruments. Sadly, I'm hoping someone else develops this issue (sorry for that!).

[mdyde]

Hello Ray,

Thanks for the very extensive testing, and my apologies for taking a while to get back to you (it's very busy at the moment).

I've just been testing on my MacBook Pro running macOS 10.13.6 with 16 GB RAM. As a test, I configured the rank settings for the MDA St. Eucaire so that Hauptwerk's 'Free GB' meter showed about 3.5 GB free prior to starting audio, and about 2.4 GB once audio is active. Without exiting Hauptwerk, I can load, unload, reload, etc. that organ over and over again (I tried about 10 times), and it works perfectly for me every time. Both Hauptwerk's 'Free GB', and macOS' Activity Monitor for the 'Hauptwerk' process, each return to almost exactly their respective values each time that the organ is loaded with that organ loaded, as expected. I can also switch back and forth between St. Anne's and the St. Eucaire, and their memory values return to their same respective values as when the respective organ was loaded previous times. Note that Activity Monitor's RAM usage for the process may not quite go back down to the initial value after unloading an organ since the Qt library that Hauptwerk uses internally doesn't necessarily free all memory immediately, but the values with an organ loaded are approximately consistent, which is as it should be. Also, during development, I tested v5 carefully for memory leaks and all appeared to be fine, so I'd be almost certain that the issue isn't actually a memory leak.

Hauptwerk (both v4 and v5) keeps all data memory 'locked' (a.k.a. 'wired') into physical RAM.

If too much RAM is wired on a Mac then strange things start misbehaving (which could very easily account for the audio drivers doing so), so, to try to guard against that, Hauptwerk has a limit for the proportion of the computer's RAM that it will ever lock. Hauptwerk's 'Free GB' figure is relative to that limit/proportion. Once the safe amount of wired RAM has been exceeded (e.g. causing an audio driver to start misbehaving), you may well have to exit and re-launch Hauptwerk (or conceivably even reboot) in order for things to work properly again.

My suspicion is that:

- The Casavant and Hereford sample sets are using a bit more RAM under v5 than they did under v4. (Some organs might use a bit more, others a bit less.)

- macOS 10.15 ('Catalina', which you're using) doesn't tolerate as large a proportion of its RAM being used/wired as macOS 10.13.6 (which I'm using) does. My reason for suspecting that is that I can use Hauptwerk without problems until Hauptwerk's 'Free GB' meter shows about 0 GB, whereas you're having problems well before that (around 4 GB). The meter itself will show the same values on either macOS version, for any given amount of physical installed RAM (i.e. 16 GB in both our cases).

- The audio problems are occurring simply because the proportion of (wired) RAM that can safely be used on your system (macOS 10.15) is being exceeded. That being the case, you would expect to need to re-launch Hauptwerk (or conceivably even reboot) in order for things to start working again.

In summary, I think you may actually need to load somewhat less into memory on macOS 10.15 than Hauptwerk's 'Free GB' meter currently shows (even though the value it currently shows should be safe for macOS 10.13). That being the case, I'll probably need to tweak the meter (safe wired proportion) differently for macOS 10.15 than for 10.13.

Thanks very much for the extensive work you've done regarding my issues, and for your extended reply. Also, there is no need to apologize for any delay you felt on replying to me as I knew you were working with many users and doing many replies.

Your explanation certainly seems valid. I guess I also need to apologize for accusing your fine work of containing any memory leak!

It is a little disappointing to me to have my organ definitions curtailed to fit as compared to the previous version, and I likely have some organs which I will no longer be able to use, but "it is what it is". I guess my next step is to take one of the organs and keep slowly increasing memory usage until I hit the point where issues begin. That will be a slow process, but once I determine that point, I can just subtract that amount from what the meter is showing as I load other organs. Since it does appear that it will be a constant value now that I have a handle on what is occurring, I can certainly deal with that.

I must also say the addition of reverb is wonderful, along with 'resetting the lights' in my Launchpads between organ loads! That Launchpad reset means a LOT to me!

Again, thank you for the testing you've done on my issue, and for your kind reply.

[mdyde]

Thanks again, Ray.

once I determine that point, I can just subtract that amount from what the meter is showing as I load other organs. Since it does appear that it will be a constant value now that I have a handle on what is occurring, I can certainly deal with that.

Yes -- the 'danger threshold', so to speak, is likely to be a fixed value on Hauptwerk's 'Free GB' meter.

I must also say the addition of reverb is wonderful, along with 'resetting the lights' in my Launchpads between organ loads! That Launchpad reset means a LOT to me!

Excellent -- thanks again.