Fix for Stuck Notes?

[Jamie_H]

Has anyone determined if there has been a fix for the stuck notes problem with Gigastudio 3? I revamped my setup from being 2 Giga 2.5 machines to one Giga 2.5 and one Giga 3 and I love it, except that my Giga 3 machine is CONSTANTLY getting stuck midi notes. It is driving me crazy and rendering my setup almost completely useless.

I am using MidiOverLan, but I have been for years without any problems. For anyone else who had this problem, did you find a fix? I haven't upgraded to the latest Giga 3 release yet (I'm on 3.04), but I will if it fixes this issue.

[JonFairhurst]

Has anyone determined if there has been a fix for the stuck notes problem with Gigastudio 3? I revamped my setup from being 2 Giga 2.5 machines to one Giga 2.5 and one Giga 3 and I love it, except that my Giga 3 machine is CONSTANTLY getting stuck midi notes. It is driving me crazy and rendering my setup almost completely useless.

I am using MidiOverLan, but I have been for years without any problems. For anyone else who had this problem, did you find a fix? I haven't upgraded to the latest Giga 3 release yet (I'm on 3.04), but I will if it fixes this issue.

Weird. There was a stuck notes problem with 3.01 to 3.03 that had to do with program changes, but that was fixed in 3.04.

I use Sonar on my Giga computer and Sibelius from my laptop via MOL+. I haven't done much with Sib lately, but when I have, I haven't had any stuck notes with 3.04 or 3.10.

There is a MIDI monitor in GS3. You might play some notes, until one sticks, then check the monitor to see if Giga thinks it received the note off message or not.

I wonder if you have some rogue process that occasionally burdens your CPU, so it misses MIDI messages. You might try killing the processes that aren't core to your system, Giga or MOL and see if that helps.

-JF

[gugliel]

I think it's the midi over lan interface, and don't think it has gone away, not by 3.04 anyway. Am using 3.1 but not driven over ethernet.

After suffering with stuck notes a lot I finally changed things to put my heaviest midi traffic on ports connected to gigastudio either by hardware or directly through the gigastudio internal ports (shared sequencer on same computer). The internal ports never have stuck notes, the hardware ports almost never. One thing that reduces the problem is to spread the load among channels: not everything on port 1 channel 1.

On an aside, I've recently been using kontakt2 more heavily with midi over ethernet -- and began to get stuck notes just like the gigastudio3 ones! deja vu...

It is possible that a sequencer (sonar, e.g.) that sends velocity 0 instead of note off events is more prone to stuck notes?

[tcovem]

I had a stuck notes problem but it was over regular MIDI. The fix for me was to turn off the audio ADAT INPUTS into my gigasampler machine (which in my case is a WaveCenter/PCI card). Do you have audio inputs enabled in your audio interface?

[gugliel]

tcovem, right, that is another factor -- the gigastudio that had stuck notes also had spdif audio input to its sound card -- though my recent k2 stuck notes were just midi, no audio input.

[tcovem]

Turning off the audio inputs (unchecking them) in gigastudio settings is what fixed it for me. I was getting the stuck notes whether or not I was actually using the inputs, as long as they were turned on. But maybe that's what you mean, Gug. According to Frontier, the makers of the WaveCenter/PCI I use, this is a GIGA bug not a driver problem (but of course they'd say it's not their fault ;-) and that Tascam is working on it. Of course, if that's the case, I do wish Tascam would let users know about it, especially when I emailed them about it directly (no response from Tascam support in over a week).

[Jamie_H]

Hmmm, I don't have any audio inputs listed (System Settings->Hardware), so I don't think that is it.

Perhaps the problem is that since Giga 3 can load so much more into it, I am now sending a ton more midi data across MidiOverLan. It does seem to stick notes more often in the areas that have a heavier amount of MIDI notes.

I checked with the Gigastudio MIDI monitor--it is claiming that it never receives the off events for the notes that get stuck.

So I guess some of the signs are pointing to a MidiOverLan failure? That is unfortunate, since it is so convenient. Do you guys think I should move to a hardware interface? Is there any hardware solution that isn't going to run me $600 or so? I imagine I'm going to have to buy an 8 channel MIDI out for my sequencer and an 8 MIDI in for my giga machine. Sigh.

I guess as an interim I can use some of the hardware midi ports I have to take some of the load off of MidiOverLan and see if that helps.

[JonFairhurst]

I think MOL is dropping the ball, but isn't necessarily at fault. I think your computer is just very busy at times. The fix is to optimize your PC. There is a full list of tweaks in the following thread. I use the videoguys tweaks:

http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36350

-JF

[Jamie_H]

Hmmm. Well it seems that MidiOverLan IS the problem. I don't know if that is due to the machine not being fully optomized or not.

I put the two busiest channels onto a hardware MIDI interface, and neither of those channels are getting stuck notes anymore. I'm still seeing stuck notes on the MidiOverLan channels, even though there is not nearly as much going over those channels now.

So it looks like I'll be dumping MidiOverLan and going the hardware route. Again, what do people recommend for large # of MIDI in/out channels? I've heard over and over again that USB MIDI is bad and should be avoided. So what hardware should I be looking at?

[tcovem]

Yes, USB MIDI is bad. I havn't heard a better option though. Someone said firewire, but I don't know of any firewire MIDI boxes actually. Sure, MIDI as part of an audio interface but that means paying for the interface. I already got one of them things ;-). All this to say, I'd love to know the answer too!

[yankeezulu]

Another consideration might be your LAN card/router and what speed they're running at. I've recently moved up to gigabit LAN on all my machines. Just a thought. jc

[JonFairhurst]

Yes, USB MIDI is bad.I've been using a MidiSport 1x1, then a 2x2 without problems. The latency is low enough for my sensitivity.

USB MIDI may not be the best, but I find that it meets all of my modest needs reliably.

-JF

[tcovem]

Yeah, latency is fine. Bugginess is not so fine. But it might just be my setup.

[Jamie_H]

Huh, I thought that I had narrowed the problem down to MidiOverLan, but now I have moved to mostly hardware MIDI and I am still having the stuck note problems with Giga 3.04. I went through all of the optimizations and none of them seemed to do anything.

It looks like I'm going to have to go back to using Giga 2.5, which I have been using for a long time with no problems. I am just wasting so much time with the stuck note problem that it isn't worth it.

[JonFairhurst]

Jamie,

For kicks, do a Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at the processes that are running. If you have time, list them here. There may be some processes running that don't belong.

-JF

[Jamie_H]

I may do that when I have a chance Jon, but I got fed up and have actually bailed on my Giga 3 setup for now. I went back to using my old dual Giga 2.5 setup that works without problems. I have very few Giga 3 only samples, so this isn't a big hardship--it is just frustrating since I spent a lot of time setting up my new Giga 3 machine.

I went through and killed most of the processes that I could identify shouldn't be running, but I couldn't get the stuck notes problem to get any better. When I get a chance, I'll get a list of all the processes that are still running on the system.

[inteleky]

Another victim of stuck notes here. I have to say that it really sucks!!! I have a big deadline and I have to deal with this. Well, welcome to computer audio I guess...

I use midioverlan cp pe to control 2 pc's, one with giga and the other with some EW/QL stuff, from a mac with Logic pro 7. This blows. :confused: :mad:

[inteleky]

Ok. I just tried something that seems to work. Here's a little background: I was getting stuck notes at one spot in particular in a composition. All the other sections of the piece did not get stuck notes except for this one. No matter what I did, I still had this problem.

I tried everything, including all the suggestions in this post. So, I thought I would try to disable hyperthreading to see if this was causing the problem. And sure enough, IT WORKED!!! No more stuck notes during this section. I'll let you know after ten more hours of work if the problem really goes away or not...

I understand this is a topic of heated debate, especially since giga 3.1 is supposed to work just fine with hyperthreading and probably does for some users, but this solved the problem instantly.

[Ian Livingstone]

Huh, I thought that I had narrowed the problem down to MidiOverLan, but now I have moved to mostly hardware MIDI and I am still having the stuck note problems with Giga 3.04. I went through all of the optimizations and none of them seemed to do anything.

It looks like I'm going to have to go back to using Giga 2.5, which I have been using for a long time with no problems. I am just wasting so much time with the stuck note problem that it isn't worth it.

I had huge problems when using MidiOverLan PE - I eventually bit the bullet, bought 14 x 8way interfaces (7 Midex's, 7 AMT8s) and a shed load of midi leads. Set everything up and to my horror I still got stuck notes.

Good news is the problem turned out to be a problem with my settings in Nuendo3 (so would apply to SX too) - I was using giga's synchro record, and sending midi clock and midi timecode from Nuendo (in the Sync setup page, I'd ticked a load of midi timecode destination and midi clock destination channels to tell giga to start recording). I unticked all the boxes and since then no stuck notes.

Anyone wanna buy a midex / amt8?!

Ian

[gugliel]

Ian -- you may have pinpointed the problem with stuck notes on gigastudio, and kontakt, too. I had hardware midi sync being sent on one channel in parallel with midi over ethernet on other channels. If the receiver periodically had to re-synchonize, then it would have to drop or skip midi events -- zero velocity notes (note endings) would be good candidates.

!!!! If this works, hallelujah!!!

[Ian Livingstone]

Ian -- you may have pinpointed the problem with stuck notes on gigastudio, and kontakt, too. I had hardware midi sync being sent on one channel in parallel with midi over ethernet on other channels. If the receiver periodically had to re-synchonize, then it would have to drop or skip midi events -- zero velocity notes (note endings) would be good candidates.

!!!! If this works, hallelujah!!!

let me know how you get on - from reading this thread it looks like there may be more than 1 reason for stuck notes - this one fixed it for me though :-)

Ian

[howardv]

Good example of how much one whose been using a program like gs a long time takes for granted. It never occurred to me that anyone might turn on mtc in their sequencer and send it to gs. But I can see now how an option labeled "Synchronize to MIDI" might get you to do that. I think that long ago they used to use a little cryptic icon/button instead and that you saw the notice ""Waiting for MIDI Start message" when you clicked on record.

I think if you dig into the GS help system on it, there is an explanation that the option just tells gs to respond to midi start and stop messages from the sequencer. I use Sonar myself and all I have to do is configure its sync option to send Midi Start/Stop and not Continue or MTC.

Howard

[gugliel]

This fix works for me! I had been using midi synch when recording section at a time (to synchronize samplitude on the recording machine), but leaving it on all the time even though it wasn't used for anything except sectional recording. Turned it off, and now can play through a full orchestra sequence, 10 minutes, 167 tracks, 16 midi ports, three computers, and 45000 midi events -- no stuck notes at all!! (yet ... ) This stuck note issue has been a constant annoyance and time-waster and work-around-prompter over the past year or so.

[inteleky]

Dear Stuck-Note Victims

Since I don't use sync to midi, I guess my solution will not apply to those who do... However! Just to give you an update... I worked all day yesterday without a single stuck note (a first). And this was after several breaks where I shut down my systems and turned them back on etc. I would say at the very least, disabling hyperthreading is worth attempting. (see my previous post)

In the interest of science, please let me know your findings! :cool: Thanks!

Justin