Crash After Running For A Long Time

Nuendo
1

Hi, All. Have been meaning to post this for at least a couple of versions.

If I’ve been working for an extended period of time–I’m talking several hours-- or left my project up while I go and do something else, there’s a good chance that sometime, after I start working again, Nuendo will freeze, with audio still playing-- meters stuck in place, entire computer non-responsive. If I’m lucky and don’t touch anything, after a few minutes (anywhere from 1 to 5+), things will start running again. If I’m not lucky, Nuendo will crash with my work up to that point unsaved. When Nuendo either crashes or returns, the computer itself once again works as it should. It’s not necessary to reboot the computer for Nuendo to run as it should; restarting the application brings things back to normal–until the next time.

This has been happening from at least the first release of N10, and I’m pretty sure it was happening on 8, as well. This has happened on every computer I work on (laptop, remote location iMacs, my desktop). You can see my RAM numbers in my sig.

For the sake of simplicity, what I’m describing happens in my most basic production (and source of longest marathon sessions), audiobooks. For these I am entirely “in the box,” and using only Nuendo’s included plugins-- compressor, expander, de-esser, brick wall limiter. RX is used as DOP, and for batch pre-processing.

This has happened using at least a couple of different interfaces, and audio buffer does not seem to make a difference.

I’m scoring a TV series right now, which is much more plugin and VSTi-intensive (a lot of UAD and others, plus Halion, Addictive “everything” and some other stuff), and I’m NOT experiencing this issue when working on music. I’m assuming that’s because I’m just not spending as many consecutive hours in those sessions.

Just wondering if others have experienced this issue, and if so, if they’ve (you’ve) found a way around it. My workaround has been to do a lot of manual saving and to restart Nuendo at the first sign of misbehavior (it sometimes hiccups a warning before a full freeze). I’m fine with that–nothing wrong with improving my working hygiene, but if there is in fact a way past this it’d be great to be able to just rely on autosave again and not worry about crashing after forgetting to hit ctrl-S for too long at 3am…

Chewy

2

Hi Chewy
That sort of rings a bell…Can it have to do with the drives your session is saved on. Is it drives that would go into sleeping mode, or drives that are firewire connected? I sort of remember having had similar problems with FW drives…
Oswald

3

Hi, Oswald.

I don’t think that’s the issue here. It’s happened with all manner of drives-- SSD internals here on my desktop, Thunderbolt/USB3 SSD on the laptop.

Unless, maybe, there’s an issue with SSDs… which would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

Chewy

4

The thing is that sometimes Nuendo starts playing again after a while, sometimes not, as you write. Makes me think its somethings outside of Nuendo that makes the problem…and Nuendo copes with it or not…But what?
Oswald

5

I know you seem to have plenty of memory, but can you monitor it’s usage to check for a possible pattern? I saw some odd behavior earlier when I was on 10.2.

6

I wonder about that, too. I think you’re way ahead of me in the “track down the inner computer system processes” side of this arena… but point taken, and I’ll see what I can figure out there.

I don’t want to jump the gun troubleshooting-wise, but as the same behavior happens over multiple computers and various configurations, it would be easy to make the (breaching protocol) leap that it’s something within Nuendo.

On the other hand… and I really don’t remember here-- but there is a fair possibility that I’m working off of a previous version template, however basic. I’m going to look into that, too; can’t remember if I rebuilt any of mine for N10. And we know how that sort of thing has gone in earlier editions.

Here’s to another shelter-in-place activity…

Chewy.

7

Ah… yeah I’d definitely make sure to work off of a new template.