liquidnotion wrote:I was able to restore from time machine. Shouldnt have had to. hmmm.. anyway LOL,
Time Machine to the rescue! Glad you discovered a workaround! 
Two possibilities come to mind, and one of them involves Time Machine . . .
(1) Something similar happens on the Mac Pro (Early 2008) running Mac OS X 10.9.2 (Mavericks) here in the sound isolation studio when I create a NOTION 4 score and change the Master output in the NOTION 4 Mixer to the Channels 9-10 pair, which is required when I am using the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid external digital audio and MIDI interface, since the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid expects the computer output to be on Channels 9-10 rather than Channels 1-2 . . .
[
NOTE: I was using a MOTU 828mkII external digital audio and MIDI interface, and it did not happen; but it started happening when I got the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid and started using it as my primary external digital audio and MIDI interface. I called MOTU technical support, and they advised that some digital audio production applications use different channels as the main or master stereo outputs, so the solution is to try different channel pairs until you hear audio, which is what I did, and the channel pair that worked was Channels 9-10, which for the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid maps to Main Out 1-2. Now that I know more about this, the problem is that MOTU begins its numerical list with Analog 1 through 8 and then the Main Out 1 and Main Out 2 are next sequentially, which technically maps it to Channels 9-10 pair in NOTION 3 and NOTION 4, which makes sense if you know about it but is a bit confusing otherwise. The MOTU 828mkII stopped working last year, which is the reason I got the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid, but I had the MOTU 828mkII repaired by MOTU, which cost $100 (US), so now I use it as a backup. At the time it stopped working, it was 8 years old, so I think that repairing it after 8 years of reliable service is reasonable, and now I have a backup unit . . . ]
What happens is that I do
not hear audio when I put notes on the staff, but when I press "Play", I hear audio and then from that time time forward everything works nicely . . .
Saving the NOTION 4 score when you cannot hear the audio does
not solve the problem, so I think the key is to press "Play" where there are a few notes, since this solves the problem . . .
(2) Another possibility is that Time Machine is configured to save everything very frequently, but I am
not running Time Machine, so this probably is not the cause of the problem, although I recall reading something about Time Machine and real-time processing, which among other things is the reason I do not use Time Machine . . .
Instead, I clone the internal hard drives to a duplicate set of internal hard drives every so often, and I also have LaCie d2 Quadra external hard drives that I use for backups . . .
THOUGHTSIf you have your MIDI keyboard connected to an Apple Display, then you might need to use the external power supply for the MIDI keyboard, since the power from the USB ports of an Apple Display is not very strong. If there is no external power supply for the MIDI keyboard and you have the older style Mac Pro, then you can connect it to one of the USB ports on the front panel or back panel of the Mac Pro, since these USB ports have more power, except that pressing the "Play" button solves the problem as best as I can determine . . .
I am not certain what to do for a MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or iMac with respect to getting sufficient power from a USB port, but there should be USB ports with sufficient power . . .
The ports on the back of an 23" Apple Cinema Display have sufficient power for the Behringer U-Control UMA-25S Mini-MIDI Keyboard but not enough power to charge the battery of an iPad, so it depends on the device and its power requirements . . .
On the good side, you know the workaround, and from my perspective when there is a simple workaround, I am happy . . . 
WORKAROUNDS AND HAPPINESSThe reason I am happy when there is a simple workaround is that beginning before there were personal computers, the folks who design and program operating systems and programming languages have been and continue to be obsessed with "fixing" stuff that does
not need to be fixed; and the result for people who develop applications and use applications is that new versions of programming language compilers, operating systems, and so forth are quite likely to cause stuff that was working nicely suddenly to start having problems; and this also happens with new versions of applications, which in the grand scheme of everything is one of the costs of moving forward in technology and is not particularly bad, but it can be a bit frustrating at times . . .
Once I became aware of this many years ago, I devised the strategy that I continue to use, which specifically is to avoid doing anything with complex commands when it can be done with a set of simple commands, even when it takes hundreds of lines of simple code, which is fine with me because I touch-type very rapidly . . .
Rolling back the clock three or so decades, in the COBOL programming language there are two general types of assignment statements used to set the values of variables, one of which is a simple "MOVE" command which assigns a single value to a single variable and the other of which is "MOVE" command that operates on a group of variables . . .
I did everything with the simple version, which most folks at the time thought was proof that I was a bit slow in the mentation department, but not so long after I started doing this the vendor released a new version of the COBOL compiler that "fixed" a bug in the "group" style commands, and then my programs were the only ones that worked, which definitively moved me into the "smart" category and in some respects into the "psychic" category, as well . . .
My logic is based on (a) knowing that the folks who do system software cannot resist "fixing" stuff that does not need to be fixed and (b) knowing that it is virtually impossible for them to break simple commands, although I think that over the years those folks have discovered that while they cannot break simple commands, they can "retire" them and replace them with a new set of simple commands that do "essentially" exactly the same thing as the old set they "retired", which for practical purposes makes it an ongoing battle . . .
Another classic example involves the C programming language assignment statement, which one might expect could never be broken . . .
- Code: Select all
i = i + 1;
It took them a few years but they devised a way to break it, which they did; and they named it "C++", where now there are several variations, one of which is a bit strange and confusing until you understand it . . .
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i = i + 1;
i++;
++i;
At a high level, the first two are identical, but the last one is different, so while they did not break the original simple version, they added two more flavors, one of which is different . . .
I know what happened, and it happened at a team meeting on a day when everyone was bored silly and, having nothing better to do, decided it was a stellar time to do a bit of "fixing", which was when they decided to "fix" the C programming language assignment statement . . . They looked at it for a while, and then someone suggested it would be cool if it had a twinkle, so they wrote the idea on the white board, and it looked like this . . .
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i+;
Then another team member had a better idea and suggested it would have a lot more pizazz if it had two twinkles, so they added a second twinkle; and they were very happy for a while . . .
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i++;
But their happiness diminished a bit until yet another team member had the idea that made it perfect; and then happiness abounded; so they ordered pizza and had a party, because while the first version with two twinkles would not break any existing code, the second version would create a lot of confusion, especially for pattern programmers who speed-read technical information a bit too quickly at times, where for reference the second flavor of the twinkled assignment statement increments the variable
before it is used rather than after it is used, and all three flavors (original and twinkled) are legal or whatever, but the last one behaves differently, which can introduce a bit of confusion, which is fabulous . . .
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++i;
Fabulous! 
P. S. Programming is as much an art as it is a science, and one of the fascinating aspects of NOTION 4 is that there nearly always is a workaround when something does not appear to be working, as you have discovered . . .
I have not examined the source code for NOTION 4, but I think that while some of it is written in low-level C for speed and optimal memory use, other parts use the foundation classes provided by Apple, and the fact of the matter is that Apple changes foundation classes constantly; and what happens is that code that was working nicely suddenly becomes a bit quirky, so the practical solution is to do some experiments toward the goal of discovering a workaround . . .
Microsoft does the same thing, and both of them (Apple and Microsoft) at times will "slipstream" last minute changes without giving application developers time to make adjustments and to do a new round of testing . . .
Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 1:43 pm
