How many crashes have you had today?

Question

Hi guys!
Just interested to know generally, how many crashes people have per session?
I'm using G5 dual 2.3 Ghz 4.5 GB Ram, with Logic 7.1.1 and OSX 10.4.9
I regularly have 1 or 2 and sometimes 3!
I have now got used to seeing the familiar pop up "Logic has quit unexpectedly"
Is this the norm?
Cheers
Mike

Answer 1

I haven't had many crashes at all lately. Let me even over-state the case and say that I crash once a week.
But the question is this: what am I doing that causes Logic to crash? I'd say that 99% of the time, crashing can be attributed to one of three things...
• opening multiple songs at once, where one of them ends up calling for more samples to be loaded into RAM than Logic can handle. It's 75/25 that Logic will crash.
• Sometimes, using one of Logic's more touch-and-go features (beat mapping, for example) or performing an operation that's inherently buggy will corrupt a song, and that will cause a crash. If I'm able to remedy the problem within the file, no more crashing.
• something inexplicable that's extremely difficult to pinpoint the cause of, i.e., "who knows". But these are few and far between on my system.
Now... I'm running 7.1.1 on 10.4.5. I have VERY few 3rd party plugs on my system. I can run Mail, Safari, Transmit, Text Edit, Excel, and a variety of other programs all at the same time and, like DR9, I rarely shut my computer off. Sometimes I'll even check my mail while I'm doing a real-time bounce within Logic (hee hee). I say all this to show that crashing isn't necessarily a "given" with Logic, though I will say that it took me a looooong time to arrive at a system configuration where Logic was this stable.
Now#2... recently I was at a studio where I installed Logic 7.1.1 on their system with 10.4.9. It was a ******* nightmare, because Logic was crashing constantly. But then again, so was PT on that same computer... We thought it might be a USB problem, because the crashing seemed to occur on either program when we moved the mouse and activated the dock. Then we thought it might be a graphics problem because the entire computer would hang when one of the funky dialog windows was opened (i.e. Logic's preference windows). Was it 10.4.9 that was causing the problem? Or just a funky system? Hard to say...
The long and short of it is that Logic shouldn't be crashing so often on you like this. Could be a corrupt song, could be that you're trying to do something that Logic doesn't like, could be that your system needs a good clean-up. Who knows, but it's not normal.
I hope you can get to the bottom of it because I know first-hand how ******* annoying this situation is and I feel your pain.