Hello,
I recognize this is not a support forum however we’ve had a v7 support case in with Steinberg since April. I have been very patient, polite, and thorough in my documentation. After an initial few encouraging responses from Steinberg here in the US they have stopped responding to my emails since August 2nd which I don’t understand since I have been quite helpful in giving them clues on where to look. My last email to them I was still polite but emphasized the number of television shows these systems are used on, our IT department’s concern about us using such an old OS, and soon we will be forced to use an OS that does not support v5.5 making these systems obsolete.
We have 9 dual- and triple-madi Nuendo systems used in television production. Some licenses have existed since v2, the most recent purchase was v7, all are currently at v7. We didn’t need v6x at the time and early this year started clean upgrades from v5.5 to v7.
In March we discovered a problem that prevents us from using v7. While recording Nuendo will occasionally start reading files off the record drive. We’re writing perhaps 10-25 MB/s and when this occurs Nuendo is attempting to read up to 40 MB/s off the same drive. Obviously this doesn’t run for long. Stopping record and re-engaging results in the same behavior, only restarting Nuendo will correct the condition. This problem is not predictable in it’s recurrence. Sometimes it may not occur for many record engagement events, sometimes it occurs after a few record engagement events. Usually it starts in the middle of a record session, other times when first engaging record.
I installed v6.5 for testing and the issue occurred more often but to a lesser degree - instead of attempting to read up to 40MB/s off the drive Nuendo would attempt to read up to 10MB/s. This would not be a huge problem if it was brief, waveform updates for instance, but reading continuously causes failure.
In an attempt to reduce variables and help Steinberg my brilliant co-worker set up an automated script that does the following -
- Engage record on 64 tracks in Nuendo, let it run for a few minutes.
- Stop record, wait for the files to update, save the session.
- Increment an event counter.
- Repeat.
On one instance it took 131 record engagement events to occur, on another instance it took 5, and another it took 8. Once the problem starts and the record fails Nuendo will fail on records until restarted. During this problem state we did the following - - Ran Activity Monitor to confirm Nuendo is trying to read excessively off the record drive.
- Ran dtrace to monitor R/W activity from Nuendo.
- Ran iosnoop to generate a text output listing every dtrace event, providing hard evidence of what Nuendo was doing.
- Did a screen record of Nuendo, Activity Monitor, and dtrace to show the correlation.
- Sent all this to Steinberg.
Note that these extra activities were not done during non-problem events, only after they started.
I was able to guess a possible vector for the malfunction. Unlike earlier versions (v?) it appears Nuendo is not caching the waveforms in memory. I’m guessing this because during long record sessions with high track counts Nuendo’s memory footprint does not dramatically increase as it did in some earlier versions as the waveform is cached. While recording now, without the problem, past a certain point if we scroll back in the timeline we can see a few MB of data read off the drive, presumably waveform data. This stops immediately when you stop scrolling but I question whether a malfunction of that process could be causing the problem we see.
I will reluctantly purchase 9 upgrades to v8 if that fixes the issue, but Steinberg has indicated they don’t know anything about this issue so I’m a bit reluctant to devote another 15-20 hours testing with v8 if it has not been fixed. Especially with the various v8 issues that currently exist and presumably will be fixed.
And a small side confirmation - the mixer for AGT was using his personal Cubase 8.5 for recording and it “was trying to read off the drive” and crashing the recording. I explained what we found, had him downgrade to Cubase 6.5, and he was very thankful.
Summary -
There is an occasional record problem with v7 and v6.5 that crashes Nuendo forcing a relaunch.
We have tested far beyond what most other users would have done and proven Nuendo has a problem.
This occurs on various Mac models and is definitely not machine or OS specific.
When I lose my ongoing battle with IT we will be forced at some point to retire these Nuendo machines resulting in expensive transitions to something else, which will really annoy our accountant.
I apologize for posting all this on a user forum but as far as I can tell Steinberg has given up. Jeff Deno was very helpful however his promise to get me in touch with the German developers never occurred, and even if it had I provided them with such extensive documentation and proof there’s not much else for me to test.
Thanks for listening and I hope this generates some results,
Sincerely,
Hugh