pcartwright wrote:Admin wrote:As far as rewire and Reaper. This is a known issue and we've gone back and forth with the folks over at Reaper about the issue. From our standpoint the issue lies on their side. From their standpoint the issue lies on our side.....hopefully we'll come up with a fix soon
That's interesting; I have experienced similar bugs with rewire when working in Sonar. I thought that the rewire bugs were somewhat universal; is this not the case?
I have no idea how Notion 3 handles ReWire in the Windows universe, but on the Mac it works nicely when Notion 3 is the ReWire slave and Digital Performer 7 is the ReWire host, albeit when certain very specific procedures are followed . . .
On the other hand, neither Notion 3 nor Digital Performer 7 work nicely when the very specific procedures are not followed, as is the case when one starts Reason 5 and then starts Notion 3 when the "Enable ReWire" option is selected for Notion 3, with this particular Reason 5 and Notion 3 behavior being troubling, because Reason 5 is not a ReWire host controller (in other words, Reason 5 only can act as a ReWire slave) . . .
It took me approximately 3 days to discover the specific procedures and rules required to use Notion 3 in ReWire slave mode with Digital Performer 7 as the host controller, but at least some of the 3 days was focused on learning how ReWire works, since I had never used ReWIre previously . . .
And as explained in some of my posts, the fact of the matter is that it works, which for the most part is all that matters to me in a practical way . . .
Nevertheless, since I continue to do a bit of software development (primarily on the Mac and iPhone/iPod touch/iPad), I cannot help but be curious about ReWire . . .
During the 3 or so days it took me to make sense of the various aspects of ReWire, I got a few useful insights from one of the technical support folks at MOTU, which among other things was the suggestion to do some simple tests with different applications toward the goal of verifying that Digital Performer 7 was doing ReWire correctly . . .
One of the tests I did before talking with MOTU was to start GarageBand (Apple) and then to start Notion 3 with the "Enable ReWIre" option set, and there were no problems, which from a common sense perspective strongly suggests that when an application is programmed correctly for ReWire, then Notion 3 works correctly, since as a general rule Apple applications are what one calls "well behaved" . . .
However, the Reason 5 (Propellerhead Software) and Notion 3 behavior tends to suggest otherwise, if only because the folks at Propellerhead Software designed ReWire, hence one might expect that they should know how ReWire works . . .
And while Digital Performer 7 works correctly in the Reason 5 scenario, it nevertheless misbehaves in one of the Notion 3 scenarios, where to be specific Digital Performer 7 instantly crashes, which from a software engineering perspective is the direct result of not handling an error correctly or gracefully . . .
In other words, in the particular Notion 3 and Digital Performer 7 scenario, if Digital Performer 7 displayed a message stating that it was unable to engage in a productive ReWire interactions with Notion 3, this would be fine with me, but simply crashing is not indicative of great attention to detail . . .
Overall, this reminds me of the way controlling focus in early versions of Windows worked, where the correct way to do it involved using two API functions in a very specific way essentially to create a tiny virtual time machine for purposes of making events that were queued but not completely processed effectively vanish from the queue in a way that after the fact mapped to their never actually having been queued in the first place, which is one way to explain this particular behavior . . .
Attempting to alter the event queue any other way simply failed miserably and often catastrophically, so there was only one way to do it, and it was a bit strange but more in a metaphysical or philosophical way . . .
Explained another way, it is a bit like playing a note on an electric guitar when the guitar is connected to a digital echo effect unit and the echo delay time is set to 2 seconds but immediately after playing a note, you push a button on the digital echo unit that erases the digital echo unit's memory, hence even though you actually played the note on the guitar and the note was recorded in the digital echo unit's memory for subsequent repetition, pressing the "reset memory" button essentially "unplayed" the note for all practical purposes, at least for the digital echo unit . . .
So, one of my hypotheses is that there is a very subtle nuance to ReWire that requires applications to do certain things in very specific ways that might not be so well documented or easily understood . . .
From my perspective, the fact that GarageBand (Apple) works flawlessly in a ReWire environment essentially is the "gold standard" . . .
First starting Reason 5 and then starting Notion 3 with its "Enable ReWire" option previously set causing Notion 3 to crash is a clue . . .
Digital Performer 7 not being to handle being started in a way that causes it to be a ReWire slave, which results in Digital Performer 7 immediately crashing, is another clue, which is significant from my perspective because Digital Performer has been a Mac-only application for at least a decade, which strongly suggests that the folks at MOTU are highly skilled Mac programmers, hence there never should be anything that causes a MOTU product to crash on a Mac . . .
It is an interesting puzzle, and I think that there is a solution, but at present I have no idea what it might be, although I strongly suspect that it is a matter of the way the ReWIre interapplication communication protocol and overall application and operating system timing and synchronization aspects are handled in real-time on the fly, which for example might be resolved by resorting to doing something so simple as adding a few lines of code to increment an integer variable in a loop enough times to slow everything for enough time to allow already queued events to reify, which is one of the ways low-level C programmers control time in event, message, and transaction based operating systems where there are multiple levels and types of queues . . .
Explained yet another way, it is like doing what I call "playing into" the delayed echoes of an echo unit, which is a lot of FUN for lead guitar but is a bit strange until you discover the rules . . .
Initially, you have to prime the echo unit's queue, which takes a second or so, but once the echoes are working nicely you switch to what effectively is playing ahead of what the echoes will be sometime in the near future, which makes sense if you have discovered how to do it but probably makes no sense otherwise . . .
Or, consider that you are conducting a very unusual orchestra, where each section (strings, brass, woodwinds, and so forth) is in a different location somewhere in the world and each section has a pair of microphones that record what the section is doing, followed by everything being digitized and then transmitted to your location via the web . . .
And your goal as conductor is to get all the various sections synchronized in such a way that the audience simply hears a finely tuned and very precisely synchronized orchestra . . .
In this scenario, the fact of the matter is that the virtual orchestra cannot play any faster than the slowest section, and in fact has to play just a tiny bit slower due to the processing required to buffer and sequence all the various sections, and so forth and so on . . .
Stated another way, it is a matter of controlling and manipulating spacetime for the betterment and enlightenment of others, and on the Mac when one follows the required procedures and rules Notion 3 is a consistently accurate and reliable "good citizen" when it is operating in ReWire slave mode and Digital Performer 7 is the ReWire host, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous! 
P. S. It probably is the same in the Windows universe, since like Mac OS X it is an event, message, and transaction based operating system, as is Linux, and the same basic rules apply, although the API stuff has different names, design patterns, and so forth and so on, but who cares, because at the dawn of the early-21st century it all runs on Intel or Intel-compatible hardware . . .
Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:35 pm
