So, I, like probably the rest of us, have spent years struggling with Acid stability. My projects are relatively simple - DJ mixes with just a few audio tracks, a couple of VSTs on each track, and some more on the master but. But for whatever reason I would always get frequent crashes when hitting play, stopping, inserting tempo changes, adjust VST parameters.. just random, and frequently.
However I've made a couple changes to the way I use Acid, actually not in an attempt to improve stability, but they appear to have have resulted in exactly that. Maybe if you're seeing the same frequent and random crashes you could try these too?
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Prevent Acid loading the previous project on opening.
So, what I would find is that Acid would crash, then when I re-opened Acid it would either load the saved project, or the auto-saved temp project. Then Acid would crash again. Then re-loading Acid it wouldn't load the saved or temp project as it had forgotten about it, and it wouldn't crash when I manually loaded a project. Odd. In the current version I'm also seeing Acid run a quick plugin scan every time at startup. maybe related.- Load Acid
- Options -> Preferences
- General Tab
- Untick Automatically open last project at startup
- click OK
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Move so many plugins on the master bus to separate buses
My master bus would have a lot of plugins on. Some of them, such as iZotope plugins are notoriously slow at adding/removing/clicking on, etc. Some of them are super intensive on the CPU, but essentially I had all of them on one bus.
What I found was that when I came to output my project it was getting cumbersome to master and manage, as well as dealing with automation for all those plugins on the same track. So I split my master bus plugins on to separate buses based on my workflow to export the project- Create bus A and B
- all audio tracks route in to bus A
- add pre-EQ plugins to bus A, route to bus B
- Add post-EQ plugins to bus B, route to master
- and leave final compression and limiting on the master bus
Now, these two things sound totally inconsequential, but now an entire day without seeing any crashes in Acid isn't unheard of. I've in fact, this week, I've had one crash only.