Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

Hi all,

I'm trying to help someone whose English is not good.
He has an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.6 (according to the crash report), although uname -a gives
Code:
Darwin-ordinateur-de-apple.local 10.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.6.0: Wed Nov 10 18:13:17 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.9.26~3/RELEASE_I386 i386

He uses LogicPro 9, and DigiCoreAudio v. 8.0.3
Connected via firewire is a Digi 002 running ProTools.
All ran as merry as a marriage bell like this until the upgrade to Snow Leopard, which he did using the 29 euro upgrade, not the "box set".
He now has random crashes - the system will run for a while, then crash.
He has sent me a PDF of a crash report which I don't know how to attach on this forum; it gives:
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

From what follows this, it seems that DigiCore Audio Manager starts four times just before things grind to a halt.
Is anyone else using this setup? Any ideas?

Reply 1 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

My first thought would be that the person has some bad RAM. It's also possible that the firewire connected device has gone bad. It also couldn't hurt to check the website of the maker of the device and software to see if there are any known issues with 10.6.6. A lot of times "specialty" apps tend to be horribly written and are incredibly fragile so that seemingly simple changes will cause them to break. Since there's little to no competition in their particular niche, and they tend to have you because of the amount of money you've already sunk into their product, there's little to no incentive to really improve the software in any substantial way.

Reply 2 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

Thanks for the reply.
I don't think it's a hardware problem. Firmware sounds more likely, but it worked fine with Tiger, apparently. I've had a look at the website, as far as I could make out it's supposed to work with 10.6.6; but since I'm not familiar with the device or the software, and he's 400 km away, and his hand-waving explanations are sometimes a bit hard to follow over the phone . . .
I was hoping to get someone (a musician, it's music stuff) who uses the same equipment and could say either "works for me" or "everyone has this problem, you need to install foobar and use a left-footed mouse" or some such.
Sorry for the slow reply, I had trouble logging in.

Reply 3 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

Bad RAM definitely

Reply 4 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

Thanks.
I've passed on the content of both posts to the proud owner.
Personally I don't _think_ it's hardware because 1 it has only happened since the upgrade to 10.6.6, and 2 I don't think he has any problems with other software.
I've sent him an email asking him to confirm this, and asking if he can get hold of some other RAM to try and eliminate the possibility.

Reply 5 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

Bad RAM can have many very strange side effects. Sometimes you will have only one program that ever seems to crash as a result of the bad RAM, and all kinds of other bizarre things.

It might not be a bad idea to also just try replacing the firewire cable. Fairly cheap and easy to do, and never hurts to have a spare around either. Monoprice.com is a great place for all your cable buying needs assuming they're in the US. Not sure about other countries.

Reply 6 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

>Bad RAM can have many very strange side effects. Sometimes you will >have only one program that ever seems to crash as a result of the >bad RAM, and all kinds of other bizarre things.

I've suggested to him that he try to get hold of some other RAM and another firewire cable in order to eliminate these two possibilities.
There's also some stuff on the Avid (ProTools) English site which doesn't appear in other languages, so I've sent him that too, as I still think it's more likely to be a compatibility/bug/configuration issue.
Thanks for your help, I do appreciate it.

Reply 7 : Random crashes with Snow Leopard and DigiCoreAudio Manager

I'm getting a similar error with Android's emulator crashing at a certain point, which never happened before. I see there is an OS X 10.6.7 update, perhaps it will be fixed.

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