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[surens]

Hi,

TL:DR; OS 9 SoundManager is acting weird. Cubase 5 VST audio just stops playing after a few seconds until I restart, Live 4 is not able to preview audio in the left browser panel but then it's fine. Cubase also sometimes doesn't allow me to preview samples when importing.

I'm still a relative newbie to the OS 9 world so I'm having trouble diagnosing/troubleshooting this! 


What I've tried so far:

-Trashing Sound Preferences, ASLM Preferences, System Preferences, MacOS Preferences
-Tried using a Edirol US-25 USB OS9 compatible soundcard and it still acts weird!
-Disabling/enabling Sound Extension and restarting
-Disabling/removing ReWire, ReWire.inst and Reason Demo Engine extensions
-Playing CD audio through Cubase, successfully capturing audio, then this outputting a silent AIFF file

I do not remember messing with any audio / system settings prior to this weird behaviour, haven't installed any new hardware. I remember playing around with AppleCD Player and using a light app that records CD input through VST processing.. I wonder if the CD playthrough thing has caused some kind of bug. Extensions Manager reported "REX Shared Library - - shlb ?" missing, not sure if this is related. Other programs that rely on Sound Manager like Reaktor, MaxMSP apps, HyperPrism PPC, Reason 1 work perfectly using the same existing Sound Manager.

Please help, so confused 

[IIO]

you did not say what exactly you are using, but just for a start:

 - there are generally two methods how to get audio out of music apps, the soundmanager and ASIO drivers.

 - the output settings in programs currently using ASIO are always global to the system (similar to the soundmanager setting)

 - you may not use the same ASIO driver twice from two different programs

 - you may use soundmanager from one program and ASIO from another program at the same time, this includes "ASIO soundmanager"

 - rewire is a bitch and can silently stop working when it runs out of channels, but it will never affect anything outside of the rewire world.

[refinery]

everything IIO said, also, would be helpful to know your hardware specs.

if some apps are working and some are not, try increasing the memory allocation to those programs which are misbehaving. OS9 applications do not dynamically claim RAM as it needs it, you set a minimum and maximum in the application's info window in the Finder.

[surens]

you did not say what exactly you are using, but just for a start:

 - there are generally two methods how to get audio out of music apps, the soundmanager and ASIO drivers.

 - the output settings in programs currently using ASIO are always global to the system (similar to the soundmanager setting)

 - you may not use the same ASIO driver twice from two different programs

 - you may use soundmanager from one program and ASIO from another program at the same time, this includes "ASIO soundmanager"

 - rewire is a bitch and can silently stop working when it runs out of channels, but it will never affect anything outside of the rewire world.

Thanks for the reply. This is useful.

Re: hardware: I'm on a G4 Quicksilver tower running OS Z1 9.2.2, Mac OS ROM 9.0.1 1.5GB RAM which has worked fine for 2 years until this mystery issue.

In Extensions Manager, I noticed I have two 'Sound Manager's... one under the Extensions list but another 'Sound Manager' under System Folder. Is this normal? The both have different Quicktime references too..


This is the first:


This is the second under System Folder:

[surens]

everything IIO said, also, would be helpful to know your hardware specs.

if some apps are working and some are not, try increasing the memory allocation to those programs which are misbehaving. OS9 applications do not dynamically claim RAM as it needs it, you set a minimum and maximum in the application's info window in the Finder.

Thank you, I've generally tried to re-allocate at least twice more memory than the suggested amount to all my apps. And I of course wouldn't have changed any memory settings in Cubase 5 or Live 4 in the last few weeks but I will go verify now just to make sure.

[surens]

Currently seems to be okay after a Cubase 5 re-install. It allows me to preview samples in the Import dialog box but Ableton Live 4 still doesn't!

I guess I'll have to re-install Live 4 too. Something must have corrupted between them, though it's strange to think this happened simultaneously. I am suspecting a VST may be the culprit as Live 4's VST folder reference lives in the Cubase folder.

[IIO]

if one accidentially misbehaved in the regards of my first post, an audio IO might crash but not tell you. in this case rebooting OS9 will fix it.

about the preview function: can it be that you try to listen to a file format which live does not understand? like sun audio or 32 bit float?

[surens]

if one accidentially misbehaved in the regards of my first post, an audio IO might crash but not tell you. in this case rebooting OS9 will fix it.

about the preview function: can it be that you try to listen to a file format which live does not understand? like sun audio or 32 bit float?

Yeah rebooting didn't seem to do it for me 

Good point re: file formats, but Live 4 always defaults to the same browser folder my audio is in and it used to preview them just fine! I will continue to troubleshoot..