danger, dirty midi guts topic

[info at zoekeating <info@zoekeating.com>]

I've been pursuing this on the Ableton forums, and thought I might as  
well post here too...

I wonder if anyone else has ever had this problem?? Its been going on  
for me for a long, long time and I think I just found a clue!

The backstory:

- I am remotely controlling Live with a foot pedal, blah blah.
- The foot pedal is hooked up to a MOTU Ultralite.
- MOTU ultralite goes into MIDIPipe, MidiPipe goes into Live.

80% of the time, everything is hunky dory. Occasionally, when I start  
up the MIDI is dead. I can see the midi signal flash on the LCD of  
the MOTU. However, according to my trusty MidiMonitor, nothing is  
coming in on the MOTU port, and in fact...the MOTU port doesn't show  
up when this occurs so there is nothing to see. (clue)

I can also get this to happen when, like a genius, I spontaneously  
edit and recompile my AppleScripts right before going onstage. That  
means quitting and restarting MIDIPipe. When I do this, invariably my  
MIDI input is dead. (clue)

(I'm using the pedal to control external hardware and this I can  
always do just fine. Good ol hardware. Again, messages are coming  
into MOTU according to the LCD.)

Seems like the problem has to be MOTU or Apple or MIDIPipe. I've been  
trying to sort it out with MOTU for donkeys years. They blame Apple.  
No one at Apple has ever responded, but the forums say MOTU. Nico, as  
far as I know, doesn't respond anymore to MIDIPipe questions.

The only thing that gets my MIDI back up is crazy, frantic powering  
off the MOTU and rebooting my computer, (and WTF, order seems to  
matter) and its always freaky to do onstage AND sometimes it doesn't  
work. I have to do it twice. I can also never remember the correct  
order (MOTU - Computer - MIDIPipe) in these situations. I dread this  
more than anything.

Well, it just happened again, and I looked in my console.  (why  
didn't I look before??!)

There is this error: MIDIServer crashed
And indeed, the MIDIServer crash log is full of stuff, from every  
time I have this problem!!

This is the best clue yet. But I have no idea what to do with it.

Does anyone have any suggestions what to do next?