UA Mixer Engine & UAD Meter / Control Panel Freezing

Has anyone else encountered issues with the the UA Mixer Engine and/or the Meter & Control panel consistently freezing?

Things have been working all right, but as of today the software has started freezing every time I try to run it. I've uninstalled the software and completely trashed the prefs, and there's been no improvement. I did install the latest update Apple sent out trying to address the Meltdown and Spectre exploits, but I'm not sure if that's precisely when I started having trouble with the UAD software.

I'm running macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 and UAD 9.4 on a 2017 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Normally I run Logic Pro X, but I'm encountering these problems without starting Logic.

Very frustrating.

Not running High Sierra here (still on Sierra for my DAW) and haven't seen this kind of issues on my rig.

Another troubleshooting step you could try is to make a new system account and try using it under the fresh account. It is has the same issues there it takes a whole gamut of potential issues off the table and if it works then it's something in your current account. Also good to fire up Activity Monitor and watch the various section to see if something is crashing and/or pegging out your CPU or hogging a whole bunch of I/O or something. I've seen some strange things hogging CPU that cause all kinds of issues (like a process firing up and crashing and spin dumping over and over again).

Hope this helps.

Problem RESOLVED

Hey,

First of all, thank you very much for your response. Any attempt to help is always appreciated.

I suspected that the 10.13.2 supplemental update was the culprit and that appears to have been the case. I couldn't find a procedure for removing the update so I reinstalled High Sierra by restarting, holding down CMD-R, and choosing the reinstall option from the recovery menu. As soon as the reinstallation was complete, I logged in and boom, the UAD software runs fine.

So I lost a session's worth of productivity and thank you, Apple, for the aggravation, but at least the fix wasn't too much of a hassle.

Glad that worked for you ... but just pointing out that it might not have been the issue. When doing a full reinstall like that you also get a clean user account, you might have been able to get away with just a new user account (but who knows). If it happens again I would try the user account first just to rule that out, it could have been something that the update did to a peference or something else with your account, or like I said a daemon or other background app that was dying and re-launching etc.

But again glad you're back to running ok.

Yes same for me.

Since the 10.13.2 supplemental update, the UAD audio engine and the console freeze after sleep cycles.

For now, I find that powering off and on my Twin restarts the driver. But this is very counter productive. I'll see tonite at the studio if the same happens with the 8p.
Some OS-specific hack somewhere in the UAD code? Or maybe the code was leveraging the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws

Anyhow, i'm surprise the dev team is not more proactive about these issues. It seems to happens at about every minor system update and the UAD software releases are far apart and usually behemoths with a shitload of new features... i understand the AVID-style "Do not upgrade your OS" directive, but not being able to apply security patches on a mission critical system is just not acceptable.

Maybe it's time to go a bit more agile with releases and provide regular maintenance updates?

The problem is that it's like playing whack-a-mole. Apple releases a knee jerk reaction to some security update and changes/breaks behaviour for something or other then it takes time to get back through the ranks to the dev teams who fix when they have cycles. It's just a time consuming process. I am pretty sure that UAD (and most hardware manufacturers) recommend against sleep for host computers in most situations. I haven't let any of my DAWs sleep in decades, just too many options for issues.

For the argument sake, in face of apologists:

Close lid of laptop == sleep.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but with a great product like the Twin, I would imagine that many, many, many, many users have a mobile setup. The product beauty shots and vids do seem to be focusing the mobile use case...
And, in 2018, where all computers are connected to the internet, running without applying critical security patches is a bit irresponsible. I think even my very old mom understands this.

I would hope the dev team:
- are active users themselves
- has somebody (rotation or dedicated) assigned to maintenance, per OS
- they have an Apple Dev account
- install patches ahead of official releases
- try the software daily in typical hardware environment (old lappy, new lappy, old OS, latest OS...)
- focus on those recurring issues that pop up at every software update

At least, that's what I enforce for my dev teams; know your users and be ahead of them, it's more economically viable for the company in the long run.
Simple non-sensical software development practices.

I don't suggest the UAD dev team doesn't do any of the above, but since the MacOS security patch was released on the 8th and I didn't see an announcement anywhere about a lack of compatibility with it (something you usually put on the /support page flashing in red and send an email to users), it tells something is slightly broken in the release process.

I'm just pissed i lost my time and the time of others figuring that one out.
And I'm tired of hearing developers blaming others when they drop the ball - I'm old and grumpy.

I still think the UAD platform is amazing.
End of my rant.

I'm not saying to not run the updates, I'm saying to not sleep your machine with an active Apollo connection which is exactly what UAD suggests. That means quitting your DAW and quitting Console and quitting the UAD monitoring app before putting your machine to sleep.

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/206502343-Apollo-Twin-General-Usage-Notes

See the section on "System Sleep"

And what I'm saying in terms of Apple's updates is that Apple regularly breaks behaviours on these knee-jerk security updates, especially in the recent past. In fact wasn't it not too long ago that they had to issue the same security update 3 times in a row because the first two broke other stuff and/or just didn't work as they were intended to? UAD can't fix that ... and it seems like this new update is exactly one of those kinds of updates judging from how many things users all over the internet are reporting as broken after that specific update. Not just UAD users seeing strangeness here, I've seen lots of reports on various forums of other software having issues after this update.

wileri said:

At least, that's what I enforce for my dev teams;.

Click to expand...

You run dev teams? For what type of stuff might I ask?

UA Mixer Engine & UAD Meter / Control Panel Freezing

I’ve never run the current version of OS X with critical audio hardware/software ... I’m on 10.12.6 and will be for a while ... I reckon that’s the best option.

I agree -- seems like the testing process should be updated, and if updates break drivers, there should be a place where that information is released.