The crashing is back, pulling my teeth. Need to vent!

I'm ripping my hair out. Again.
I just feel like I need here to vent in order not to go mad – not feeling like booking a meeting with a shrink for this – so bear with me.

The story: I've been making music for 20 years. It was an idea for several years that I'd get into the MPC world as it always fascinated me, me being a hardware sampler guy since early 2000. Early this year, I first got myself an MPC 2500 + JJOSXL. Then I got the Ren. I also bought a broken MPC 2000 XL, which I fixed. I started 30+ of songs with those, feeling more inspired than in years. Then I started thinking that maybe one day I'd bring some of that action into my live sets, so I thought, heck, I'll import the 2500 and XL projects into Ren, buy the Studio, and take that with me to gigs one day (my Ableton Live live setup is something I can take into gigs but I can't add anything extra in that – but I can manage to slip the slim MPC Studio in there, though).

As soon as I got the Ren, I realized it was crashing all the time. All the time. For various reasons. I let it gather dust for a while. Then I got the 1.3 update which felt better but I realized that all projects that were started pre-1.3 crashed upon saving. Took a while till J. Sandeen realized that if I imported all programs, samples etc separately and then saved that as a new project, it'd work – and it did. For a while.

Until now. Which is extra nice considering I just sold my 2500 and XL after realizing their projects import well enough.

So I have 30 songs I want to work into an album using just the Ren, and the crashing is back in such a huge fashion, it's killing me. Even today, I must've gotten around 15 crashes in three hours. Mostly when I save, but then I realized there's a workaround for that if I save seqs + progs separately and don't use the "Save Project" command.
Fine. Now I'm getting crashes even when I copy a sequence. That's something I don't have the tools to fight against. That's just too much.
I recently had two wisdom teeth pulled, and got two more waiting, and in all honesty, the process of having those pulled wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as this. I'm serious.
The icing on the cake is that often, after a crash, I just reboot the software, and I'm getting the annoying "!computer stopped communicating" on the MPC screen, and it won't go away until i re-boot both the MPC and the software. Haha. Lord...

My frustrat-o-meter is hitting all-time high. In this 20 years of making music I can't recall a moment when I was this frustrated, ready to punch somebody (even though I've been doing a lot of spiritual reading and thought I was a pretty calm person...now life's showing me that The Ren is the ultimate test. Haha. Geez!).

This is a mess. I'm panicking – just a little – as my other two MPCs are now gone.
I'm extremely inspired to work on all the MPC songs I have but The Ren is making it a living hell. I can work on the songs but in a way I can't.

Now, who can I start sending all the crash reports to? I really want to help make this thing work. It did work, for a while, but now it's simply killing me again. I don't always want to write a report on a forum: I demand a direct channel for that. IMHO, any software company that takes itself seriously has to have some sort of [email protected] sort of email or something.

I've got a late 2011 Macbook Pro, 17", OS X 10.6.8, 16 gigs of ram and an SSD drive so I've got the most powerful tools for the trade, and I've invested in them for a reason; I'm trying to be pro with music.
This should be going as smooth as silk but hell no, this is bad. Bad.
I can put up with lack of features and the fact that the software is young - as there's often a workaround for things, and I'll be happy as long I can make music without losing it - but the crashing is the ultimate inspiration killer and now there's moments when I want to toss the Ren into the nearby sea and go back, exclusively, into using my Akai s3200 from 1992. It works, it won't crash, and it's got a shitload of features. Too bad I can't take that to gigs, though.

Uh. Sorry. Really needed to vent. Would really love to hear if anyone else's in a similar situation.

You should be able to send crash reports direct to Akai using their support email address, hopefully they'll get forwarded to the devs.

The communication issue is common for me after a boot up - I find switching the controller on and off a couple times normally solves this, I don't have to reboot the app unless I intend switching between Ren and Studio.

I remember reading somewhere that you should power on the Ren and wait 5 seconds before starting up the app.

Hopefully 1.4 will be out soon - see if that fixes things for you.

In the meantime, have you run a full uninstall, reboot, reinstall and reboot? Use the uninstallMPC app in Mac HD > Library > Application Support > Akai > MPC

And here's another problem.

I boot up the Ren, import the project I'm working on.
Well, I can't copy the sequence I'd like as it'd crash – so I make a new one. I put some work in, and all goes fine.
Well, obviously I can't save the project as it makes the Ren crash (as I've now witnessed 20+ times today when hitting CMD+S), so what can I do: I save the current, new sequence by "save current sequence".

Well, then it happens that I take a break.
I turn off the Ren of course. Later on I come back. I want to continue working on the project. I import the project, which now doesn't automatically load the newly created sequence as I couldn't save the project as it crashes so it doesn't have information for loading the new seq. Well, let's import the sequence. It seems fine – except now it doesn't load any insert effects for that sequence, and everything sounds very off and wrong. Grrraaaaahhhh!

Fanu wrote:And here's another problem.

I boot up the Ren, import the project I'm working on.
Well, I can't copy the sequence I'd like as it'd crash – so I make a new one. I put some work in, and all goes fine.
Well, obviously I can't save the project as it makes the Ren crash (as I've now witnessed 20+ times today when hitting CMD+S), so what can I do: I save the current, new sequence by "save current sequence".

Well, then it happens that I take a break.
I turn off the Ren of course. Later on I come back. I want to continue working on the project. I import the project, which now doesn't automatically load the newly created sequence as I couldn't save the project as it crashes so it doesn't have information for loading the new seq. Well, let's import the sequence. It seems fine – except now it doesn't load any insert effects for that sequence, and everything sounds very off and wrong. Grrraaaaahhhh!

you may not want to hear this bro but have you ever done a fresh reinstall of your O.S.?for now only install the Ren software.test it for a while see if it crashes then slowly reinstall your other apps(make sure of course all ur drivers needed for ur computer to work are installed first )I find this solves alot of problems.
my software is extremely stable .......my tracks are really complex...no issues here. just trying to help.peace

Install a fresh OS on an external USB or firewire drive and just boot your Mac from that - install the MPC app and see what happens. This way you don't interfere with your current system at all. Shouldn't take too long - an evening at most.

Disk performance will be slower, but it should be fine to test most problems.

try updating you mac os could be that simple

i'm on 10.7.4

hope you get it sorted out sounds abit of nightmare and that's without the teeth

Just reinstalled the software.
Didn't help at all. Still getting crashes on saving as well as copying the sequence.
This doesn't happen with all my projects; just the one I want to work on and finish right now. This is a nightmare.

However, as soon as I installed the MPC1.0 from the CD and before I updated it, I quickly loaded up the project on that one, and it didn't crash on the tasks that make 1.3 crash.
It crashes after on 1.3.

Even if it might be a good idea, I can't really go and do a re-install on the OS...got too much work going on atm. Might try an update, though.

Also, something worth noting is that if I import the project and then try to save it into a new location, it only gets to save the first two sequences before the crash. There's nothing else.
I know this by looking inside the newly-created folder after the crash.
It's also noteworthy that sequences 3 and 4 of my project are which cause the crash if i try to copy them...i can copy seqs 1 and 2 OK.

would u be willing to send me the session?

masada2502 wrote:would u be willing to send me the session?

Are you a dev?

I'll now be updating my OS X 10.6.8 to the latest Mac OS.
Who knows how that will go regards to everything not related to the Ren, but I'm taking one for the team. I just want that shit to work...I've got an album to finish, and I can only do that with a Ren that doesn't crash on me 35 times during a session and which lets me save.

I'll see you in a bit...or not

Whoa – I think I'm onto something here.

As I'm waiting for the new OSX to download, I was thinking if there was anything new I had installed recently, as the problems started re-occurring quite recently.
I realized I bought and installed DMGAudio's EQuick plugin somewhat recently, which I am using on several channels of this problematic project.

I moved it away from the plugin folder, loaded the project....and I can now save it, copy the sequences etc. No crashes. Hmmmm.

Maybe it's too early to celebrate, who knows...I'll still let the new OSX install and see if that causes any difference.
If not, I'll continue investigating this.

Installed OS X 10.8.3.
Did it fix my problem? Did it fûck.
Same shït, different OS.

I very rarely feel like crying a little. I do now.

Quite sure it is some plugin or sample that's causing the crashing.

you seem to have the worst of luck with it, this made me realize i aint pulling trigger on ren until after 1.4 feedback

I feel your pain man. I was meticulously mapping out all of the controls on Waldorf Largo last night to my Novation SL49 MKii so that I can program entire new patches without opening the GUI. When doing that you need to hit save or save as default to get what you've done to stay. I had it loaded in the MPC Renaissance on a completely new blank project, only Largo, just mapping controls. I hadn't saved for about 2 hours as I was focused on mapping controls in a logical fashion. All of a sudden...... crash.... WTF?!? I wasn't even using you! You stupid **** piece of shit! 2 hours of mapping gone. Took me the rest of my night just to get back where I was.

My lady later was like "Have you thought about getting rid of it? If it makes you angry like that maybe it's not such a good thing" I said yes, but I see it's potential. Just like in the early days of Maschine (I should have learned my lesson then, but I'm stuborn).


The worst thing possible is when you take all precautions (like saving) and that precaution causes a problem, you are then left dead in the water. This MPC has wasted so much valuable time but I still have faith it will give it back soon.