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Help? (Newbie)

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Just got my UltraPak last night.

Installation was a bit confusing, frankly, and I forsee very little fun in figuring out the delay compensation, problems with the AMD chip on my G5 Dual 1.8 (original) and all that stuff, but wow, that Pultec and Fairchild SURE sound nice.

Anyway... Obviously I'm just starting to dig into this, but I came upon a couple of problems right away last night and don't expect to be able to call Universal Audio during their normal hours anytime soon (at least not when I'm at my system at home) so I'm hoping a post here will help...

I'm running PT LE 6.9.2 with an Mbox on my Dual 1.8 G5 (original). Of course I had to do the VST-RTAS wrapper thing and I left the AMD compensation thing on.

I opened up a session and plopped a Pultec, a Fairchild, and a Precision Limiter on the Master. I was immediately pleased, to say the least, but here's where I came upon two little problems and one big one.

1) None of the UA plugs are categorized. Is this because of the VST-RTAS wrapper? Can anything be done?

2) Whenever a UA plug's window is the front, selected window, the space bar doesn't work in it's usual function as play/stop. Is there a way around this?

3) (The Big One) After putting those three plugs on the Master, I added the 1176 (the good one) to the vocal track. This introduced a huge White Noise and sort of Spring Reverb sort of noise that came and went whether I was playing the track or not. Freak Show! Help? Bypassing it didn't help and getting rid of the plug didn't help.

Help?!

Thanks,
Archmart
 

Archmart

Active Member
Just talked to Tech Support at UA

Hey Hey!

The answer I got was that there was nothing to be done about the two small problems and the big problem... He said it was all on my Mbox. He said it's a known problem and there's just nothing to do about it. Mbox has some major issue and it's not just with UA. He said he was surprised that I hadn't had the problem before installing the card/software... He said it was well documented.

Can anyone point me to more info about this?

Thanks,
Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
Hi Archmart,
There is a problem with the Mbox (as well as other USB audio interfaces) and white noise. It happens rarely, but it seems that having a large load of UAD-1 plugins seems to exaggerate it. I don't have specific links, but I remember a few threads in the DUC about Mbox noise. Overall USB is a fairly lousy protocol for audio, especially if you are doing a bit more than 2 track location recording.

The VST-RTAS adapter causes the plugins to be categorized under \"Other\". I thought I remember hearing that you can now organize plugins to your liking with PT 6.9. Not being a pro tools user though, I'm not sure exactly how to do this.

The other case is also related to the VST-RTAS adapter. What happens is the window is in \"focus\" and waiting for key commands, so any key commands you give get grabbed by the RTAS plugin window. We're looking into this one.
 

Archmart

Active Member
It basically comes down to the fourth instance...

Hey Hey!

I did a little experimenting.

Basically...
1 Stereo Track, adding 1176 plugs,
whether LN or SE doesn't matter...
... the fourth plug inserted causes the white noise.

Before I give up and return my card...

Is this definitely the \"known problem\"?

And I can't seem to find any reference to it anywhere, by the way.

Confused,
Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
We've never had a case where it reproduced everytime, so this might be promising.

Does it happen if you use 4 of a different UAD-1 plugin, like an LA-2A? Or is it just with the 1176s?

If you make a second stereo track (can be just a copy of the 1st one) and do 2 1176s on each track, does it happen?

Also, what is your \"Block Buffer Size\" setting in the FXpansion adapter and your H/W (hardware) buffer size in PT LE?

Thanks.
 

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Very encouraged that you're asking these questions. Thanks for working with me. I really appreciate it.

I'm in a near panic here, so I'm also posting my concerns/questions on the DUC and will probably pose the question to the ProTools Chicago group, the Chicago chapter of the AES, of which I'm a committe member and Chicago EARS (Engineering And Recording Society) hoping for a tip, and so I want you at Universal Audio to know that I'm not the sort to go badmouthing unfairly. I'll be sure to post how helpful you're being and I've already made a point of how just a taste of how these plugs sound has me hooked and therefore I MUST get these issues sorted out.

I'll explore more tonight when I get home but here's what I've tried so far...

When I first had the problem I had the Pultec Pro, the Fairchild, and the Precision Limiter on my Master, in a fairly big session. After wetting myself at how amazing that sounded, I cleaned up and then tried to put an 1176LN on the vocal. That's when it happened. Interestingly, it also seemed to continue after taking the 1176LN out of the vocal insert (not just bypass), but it was intermittent then. I had to close and open the session again. Of course I thought it must be a problem with the 1176LN, so I tried the SE. Same thing. I tried numerous other plugs on the vocal restarting ProTools each time. Same thing.

After this happened I ran the previously described test... Here's more detail:
I opened a test session that had 1 stereo and 1 mono audio tracks.
The Stereo track was muted. I imported a stereo audio file into it.
I added 1176LNs to fill up the rest of the inserts, then filled up the mono audio track's inserts with more 1176LNs. Then I added another new track and added 1176LNs, playing the track each time I inserted another 1176LN until I finally hit some kind of limit and got an error saying that one of the 1176LNs was disabled.
I unmuted the stereo track and got the noise, I think I also got an error message.

I restarted ProTools and opened up the same test session (I didn't save it when I closed, by the way)
I got rid of the two plugs that were in the stereo audio track and imported a stereo audio file
I got rid of the two inserts that were in the stereo audio track. No inserts in the Mono track.
I imported a stereo audio sample and dropped it into the stereo audio track.
I added 3 1176LNs to the inserts of the stereo audio track.
I added a 4th 1176LN to the stereo audio track. - Loud White Noise

I closed ProTools without saving and started over, but this time with 1176SEs. Same thing.

Next I did the same thing but tried various different UAD-1 plugs for the 4th plug each time. Same thing.

It's interesting that it doesn't do it when the track's muted.

Talking to Casey on the phone, and reading your response, I'm confused about how this could be an Mbox issue. I suppose it's obvious that USB has it's limits, but it's really JUST two tracks coming in and out. In this case I'm only mixing so I'm only using the two outputs. But perhaps I'm missing an important point.

What I do know is this. I've got 22 songs to mix and I've really placed my eggs in the UA basket here. I need this to work. I have intended to upgrade to a DIGI 002 or (002R) or equivalent at some point but right now, as I'm sure you're aware, there's a lot of reason to believe that something major is on the horizon with Digi. Who knows what's in ProTools 7, and who knows what's going to happen with the hardware. I'd hate to upgrade now (also not the best time financially) and regret it in 2 or 3 months. I know that's always the issue, but it seems particularly probable right now. Given this situation, I may HAVE to return the card if I can't really use it and wait to see what comes next. It seems UA would have to be trying to work with Digi hardware, but it sure sounded on the phone like you guys aren't too happy with them right now.

Really hoping for a response back in time to experiment and call back before the weekend... Thanks, Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
No problem. Obviously if there is something we can do to fix anything we want to do it, and since it's an issue that I've been unable to nail down before, it's great to get more info.

Archmart said:
...Interestingly, it also seemed to continue after taking the 1176LN out of the vocal insert (not just bypass), but it was intermittent then. I had to close and open the session again...
Yes that's normal. What's happening is the data stream to the Mbox over USB is getting (for lack of a more straighforward technical term) screwed up. So it gets stuck in this state until you re-initialize the audio engine (changing hardware buffer settings should probably also do the trick).

Archmart said:
After this happened I ran the previously described test... Here's more detail:
I opened a test session that had 1 stereo and 1 mono audio tracks.
The Stereo track was muted. I imported a stereo audio file into it.
I added 1176LNs to fill up the rest of the inserts, then filled up the mono audio track's inserts with more 1176LNs. Then I added another new track and added 1176LNs, playing the track each time I inserted another 1176LN until I finally hit some kind of limit and got an error saying that one of the 1176LNs was disabled.
I unmuted the stereo track and got the noise, I think I also got an error message.
That first error message was probably you exceeding the DSP on the UAD-1 (7-8 enabled 1176LNs would fill up 1 card at 44.1). Did the second error (after the white noise) say something about "Interrupts held off too long..." or something to that effect?

Archmart said:
I restarted ProTools and opened up the same test session (I didn't save it when I closed, by the way)
I got rid of the two plugs that were in the stereo audio track and imported a stereo audio file
I got rid of the two inserts that were in the stereo audio track. No inserts in the Mono track.
I imported a stereo audio sample and dropped it into the stereo audio track.
I added 3 1176LNs to the inserts of the stereo audio track.
I added a 4th 1176LN to the stereo audio track. - Loud White Noise

I closed ProTools without saving and started over, but this time with 1176SEs. Same thing.

Next I did the same thing but tried various different UAD-1 plugs for the 4th plug each time. Same thing.
So this 4 plugins on a single track sounds like it's 100% reproduce-able each time. Also, if I'm following you right, it sounds like it's a matter of 4 plugins on a single track; like if you had 8 1176SE plugins, 2 on each of 4 tracks, the white noise doesn't happen. Is that right?

Archmart said:
It's interesting that it doesn't do it when the track's muted.
That's most likely because it isn't playing any audio through, I'm not sure, but PT LE may not allocate a voice if the track is bypassed (even though our plugins might be enabled).

It may not be specifically an Mbox thing (I wouldn't be surprised if other USB audio interfaces exhibited the same thing) but it may more likely be a situation with the Mbox (USB audio interface) + PT LE + UAD-1/VST-RTAS adapter (I'm not aware of this being a problem if you are using the Mbox with CoreAudio drivers in another DAW). The Mbox does (or did) have a white noise problem, however, it happened rarely (other USB interfaces also have this problem) and is just one of the drawbacks of USB for audio, but in this case, somehow having the UAD-1+VST-RTAS adapter seems to exaggerate this.

Archmart said:
It seems UA would have to be trying to work with Digi hardware, but it sure sounded on the phone like you guys aren't too happy with them right now.
Obviously we want to have the best integration into all the popular DAW hosts, but Digidesign has not made it very easy for us at all. I think they'd much rather have you buy a TDM rig than buy a UAD-1 card with better sounding plugins ;)
 

Archmart

Active Member
UAJames said:
That first error message was probably you exceeding the DSP on the UAD-1 (7-8 enabled 1176LNs would fill up 1 card at 44.1). Did the second error (after the white noise) say something about "Interrupts held off too long..." or something to that effect?
That sounds about right. I'll try it again to confirm.


UAJames said:
So this 4 plugins on a single track sounds like it's 100% reproduce-able each time. Also, if I'm following you right, it sounds like it's a matter of 4 plugins on a single track; like if you had 8 1176SE plugins, 2 on each of 4 tracks, the white noise doesn't happen. Is that right?
As soon as I get home I'll double check the 4 plugs on a single track, trying different plugs. Then I'll try dividing them up with 2 per track. That's an interesting idea, but the first time it happened I was putting the first plug on a track when I had 3 plugs on the master.

Sweetwater's tech support suggested checking FXpansion's website for an update to the Wrapper.

By the way... You wrote the "G5 Showdown, aka Rumble in the (PCI-X) Tunnel" (nice title) right? I'm thinking of trading my original Dual 1.8 G5 for a non-AMD 8131 G5. I should go for the current Dual 2.0, right?


Thanks so much for your help. I'll try to get home in time to test this and check back one more time. You're gone at 5:00 Pacific, right? Should I call? Do I just ask for you?

Thanks,
Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
Archmart said:
As soon as I get home I'll double check the 4 plugs on a single track, trying different plugs. Then I'll try dividing them up with 2 per track. That's an interesting idea, but the first time it happened I was putting the first plug on a track when I had 3 plugs on the master.
My hunch is it might be related to going through x number of plugins in series (so if it was 1 on track and 3 on master that's 4 in series). Try just doing all tracks, none on master.

Archmart said:
Sweetwater's tech support suggested checking FXpansion's website for an update to the Wrapper.
Even though it should work fine, we don't fully support using their full version, and we do all our testing with our version of the adapter. I think ours still might be a later version anyway (1.07).

Archmart said:
By the way... You wrote the "G5 Showdown, aka Rumble in the (PCI-X) Tunnel" (nice title) right? I'm thinking of trading my original Dual 1.8 G5 for a non-AMD 8131 G5. I should go for the current Dual 2.0, right?
Yep that's me 8) Yeah the current model Dual 2.0 (PCI) would be the best model for UAD-1 performance.

Archmart said:
Thanks so much for your help. I'll try to get home in time to test this and check back one more time. You're gone at 5:00 Pacific, right? Should I call? Do I just ask for you?
No problem. I'm here until 6-6:30. I'm at x67, otherwise if some picks up, ask for James. Also, there's a button at the bottom of my posts to email me (I usually check email over the weekends too).
 

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Thanks.

I probably won't make it home (and check things) in time to catch you before leaving. So are you saying I should email rather than post?

Archmart
 

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Cool. Rather than rushing home to get you on the phone JUST before you leave for the weekend, I'll take my time and when I've had the chance to experiment a little more, I'll post and, hey, if you check it and respond, great, if not, have a great weekend. I'll go ahead and ask my questions and leave it to you to decide whether to waste your weekend on me. :)

Thanks,
Archmart
 

Archmart

Active Member
After a little more testing...

Hey Hey!

Didn't want to trouble you over the weekend...

OK...

Doesn't matter if it's the fourth plug on a single track, split up between two or more tracks, or between a track and a master... Still the 4th plug always launches the noise on playback.

Now, with 1176LNs or LEs I can get to the 4th without a warning before the noise starts. Nigel, I get a clear message that I've maxed out the card. Same for the DM-1L. In fact, with the Nigel, I even got a clip on my ProTools CPU meter as soon as I inserted it, and immediately had the noise with one plug, then another time (just now) I was able to get two Nigels going and the third one gave me the maxed out message but I never got the noise.

It seems to be monitoring only, by the way... I bounced a track that sounded like white noise out of my Mbox outputs but on playback (after restarting ProTools, the bounced track was ok.

It also doesn't matter if it's Mono or Mono/Stereo.

Thanks,
Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
Re: After a little more testing...

Archmart said:
Doesn't matter if it's the fourth plug on a single track, split up between two or more tracks, or between a track and a master... Still the 4th plug always launches the noise on playback.
Well, that kinda blows my theory of the table, but this is still good that it's 100% reproducible for you (especially with different plugins).

Archmart said:
Now, with 1176LNs or LEs I can get to the 4th without a warning before the noise starts. Nigel, I get a clear message that I've maxed out the card. Same for the DM-1L. In fact, with the Nigel, I even got a clip on my ProTools CPU meter as soon as I inserted it, and immediately had the noise with one plug, then another time (just now) I was able to get two Nigels going and the third one gave me the maxed out message but I never got the noise.
With Nigel and DM-1L is possible to max out the card very early as they take a lot of DSP (Nigel) and on board memory (DM-1L). You should be able to get 2 Nigels or 2 DM-1Ls without errors (if no other plugins are going). Also, if you do take the DSP over 100%, it would be expected that the CPU meter in your DAW would peak. I recommend having your UAD-1 Meter running so you can see how much DSP/Memory you are using up.

Archmart said:
It seems to be monitoring only, by the way... I bounced a track that sounded like white noise out of my Mbox outputs but on playback (after restarting ProTools, the bounced track was ok.
This doesn't sound too unusual as PT may not use the Mbox when doing a bounce. The data stream to the Mbox is where the problem is occurring; it's not happening internally in PT.

It' actually during playback in which the performance of the audio interface and the delivering of buffers is the most critical; not during recording like a lot of people think. During recording, if a buffer doesn't get to where it needs to be in time, it can be written to a cache or to memory and written to the disk later. During playback, however, if a buffer is not received (or delivered) exactly when it has to be then you either get some kind of overrun error, noise, or an application crash/bad driver state. Because this area of performance is so critical, it's one of the reason why USB devices don't perform as well as Firewire devices, and also why some firewire devices don't perform as well as most PCI devices.
 

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Yeh... I've been running both the UAD-1 Meter and the ProTools CPU meter as I've been testing.

So what do I do next? (besides throwning my arms in the air and crying, \"Why Me?\") Oh. Did I forget to mention that I tried that?

Archmart
 

Archmart

Active Member
How 'bout the mono plugs...?

Hey Hey!

Any chance the Mono Plug issue may be part of the problem?

If I'm not mistaken, all of these tests I've been running have been with the Mono plugs as opposed to the Mono To Stereo plugs.

Come to think of it... wait a second... the reason I was doing that is because the Mono To Stereo plugs change the metering to stereo meters on each channel and subsequent plugs have to be stereo.

Are we SURE I should get rid of the Mono plugs? I suppose it can't hurt to try, but wouldn't it also save some DSP to run a Mono plug instead of the mono to stereo?

Starting to seem strange...

Archmart
 

UAJames

Universal Audio
UA Official
Well there is technically 2 mono plugins. One set is the additional mono plugins that are an optional install; these are all the ones labeled (m) and EX-1M for EX-1 and Farichild Mono for Fairchild. If these are removed per the instruction in my last post, you will still have mono plugins for mono tracks in pro tools; it's running only the left side of a stereo plugin (and also saves DSP). This is also how Cubase and Nuendo work. When you are on a mono track, it is the same plugin file as the stereo instance, but it's using it a \"mono mode\" (although there are special cases where you can use specific mono plugins).

It would be very interesting to see if this 4 plugin situation changes if you remove the (m) plugins per my previous instructions.
 

Archmart

Active Member
Hey Hey!

Ok... Followed the instructions for removing the extra mono plugs (m)s.

(I still, when I try to insert a plug, have both (Mono) and (Mono/Stereo) versions of everything, which is a bit annoying when added to the fact that they're all filed under Digi and Other instead of a UA folder or under the EQ, Compression, etc. folders) (does that sound right?)

But it didn't seem to change anything regarding plug-in instances...

Next suggestion?

I'm going to try the 'unplug everything USB that isn't absolutely necessary' and also try different USB jacks and cable, just in case it's actually just a coincidental thing.

Archmart
 

bdangler

Member
hey Archmart,
Sorry to be a party pooper, but I had the exact same problem with my MBox and my Dual 1.8 G5. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to remedy the problem, although James et al. were very helpful. I eventually upgraded to the 002 and all the problems vanished. For me, the issue always seemed to relate to CPU load. If I pushed the UAD-1 much above 60% I got blisteringly loud white noise, no matter what plugs I was using. At the time, the issue was much discussed here on the forum, but no solutions presented themselves. I understand your trepidation at trading up the Digi ladder at the moment but, from my experience, it's the only way out. ---B
 
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