bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

i'm having a problem where more and more bus paths are progressively becoming 'unavailable', even though they are active in my i/o

after doing some work, i saved and closed a session. later, when i opened it up again, some of my bus paths were greyed out. I tried to activate them and got: the output could not be made active because the output path is currently not available

checked my i/o and the paths are still there. wasted a bunch of time deleting paths and re-importing. it worked. but when i saved, closed and re-opened, the same paths were greyed out again. LET ME REPEAT: all were working when i saved the session. but upon opening it moments later, the paths are 'unavailable'

what's worse, is that the issue is spreading. each time i open it, more and more paths are 'unavailable'.

i even did a 'save session copy' onto another drive. opened the file there and the same problem is there.

so far, no other sessions are affected. just this particular one. if i open an older session file or an older backup, the problem is there too.

does anyone have any idea what is going on?

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

The playback engine when working and when closing/reopening the session are the same ?
In the I/O menu : sessions overwrite current settings is check-marked ?
What PT version , what Mac OS ?

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

yes, playback engine is the same and the 'sessions overwrite...." is unchecked.

OS X 10.8.3
PT 10.3.5

I've been working in this session for a month and a half on this system with no problems at all. Nothing changed between when I saved and closed, and later re-opened, unless it did it in the background. I also went back through my backups until I found one that was normal, and from it, re-imported my most recent work (from the bad session), saved and replaced the bad one with it, and did a 'save copy in' to another drive. At that point, all was good. But as soon as I closed it, and opened either it or the copy I saved, both of them had paths that are now 'unavailable'. And since these paths are in the i/o window and active, there's no way for me to tell PT that the path is actually good. They are also just internal buses and I'm not anywhere near maxed out.

Also of note, when I open a send or input/output box and scroll to the bus menu, there are now two menus (bus a and bus b), whereas before there was always just one. Menu b is full of a long list of ADAT and SPDIF routing that isn't related to my playback engine. I've tried deleting all bus paths in the i/o and importing from a backup and/or PIO file, but nothing eliminates this new 'bus menu b' Its there even with an empty bus section in the i/o.

i've trashed prefs and all that.

I'm beginning to think the session file or folder may have become corrupt.

It's strange that more and more paths are successively becoming unavailable. It's a cascading effect.

All default paths are fine. Its just internal paths that I've created that are affected. If i open a send, input, or output, they are still in the list, but they are in italics and have n/a after them. If I go to the i/o box, they are in the list and are active.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

I have no precise answer, but it is worth to check "session overwrites current I/O" in the "fine" session before closing/reopening.

What about updating to 10.3.7 ?

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

I found this thread:
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=316978&page=5

post #48 is the same as my problem.

I figured out that for some reason (in only this session) PT began duplicating all my hardware sends. I have 8 Line inputs, 8 Adats, and a stereo S/PDIF.
It made duplicates of those so that I had 64 line sends and so on.

I don't know when or why. So, I deleted all those and closed IO. But my user made buses were still unavailable. I went back to IO and they were all checked 'active'. But for fun, I unchecked them all and re-checked them, hit ok, and viola they were all back on-line.

So once PT determines they are unavailable, they have to be MANUALLY reset, one by one. What a time waste.

Now, I'd like to know why PT got the notion to start duplicating things in my IO. I have the 'sessions overwrite...." UNchecked, so I thought nothing would be added to my IO.

I've since saved and closed the session a few times, and leaving that UNchecked, PT has made nothing new so far.

But I'd like to know what went awry, and how to avoid it.

I'll try checking it in a minute and seeing what happens but I don't want to open anything and have it re-write my IO. Like say from another sesssion that PT has messed up.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

Regarding the a and b menus in the io window, I believe you have 256 voices (I'm thinking you have cptk?) available.
When you exceed 128 voices, protools creates a b menu (or busses in the io settings window) for the next 128 busses.
You seem uncertain as to why all these extra voices have been assigned to various buss assigns in your io.
This suggests to me that because you didn't disable "overwrite" in the io window, you have imported data from sessions with many io settings which have overwritten your main settings and made them inactive.
I'm not in front of a PT system so I may be completely wrong but I have had similar issues in the past.
You should be able to delete all the unwanted buss paths in you io window, then reinstantiate your earlier assignments and continue as before.
Good luck.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

To clarify (from the PT9 manual);

When exchanging sessions among different systems running Pro Tools 9.0, it is generally recommended that the Sessions Overwrite Current I/O Setup When Opened option be disabled. This maintains your custom system settings and
Pro Tools automatically remaps session output busses to the system output paths when opening sessions created (or edited and saved) on other systems.
When exchanging sessions with systems running lower versions of Pro Tools, it is generally recommended that the Sessions Overwrite Current I/O Setup When Opened option be enabled. In this case, any custom settings saved with the session that do not match your system may need to be reconfigured in the I/O Setup.

Good luck.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

Iae777,

Thanks. I said in my posts above that I've had 'sessions overwrite" UNchecked, or disabled as it were, the entire time. And yet PT took it upon itself to duplicate my default buses.

It did NOT reassign any of the paths. It just continued to duplicate the default paths until a threshold was reached and then began to make 'unavailable' my user created bus paths.

However, they were still showing as active in the IO menu, which was a confusing contradiction.

This only happened in ONE session out of a group of sessions I am working on. They all share the same settings and were created from the same template.

What also confused the issue is that while initially troubleshooting this, when I deleted all the unwanted bus paths and trimmed things down to 40 or so, my user created paths were still showing up in the bus menu as n/a or 'unavailable'. It was only after going back into the IO window and unchecking and then rechecking the 'active' box that they would come back.
Before I figured that out I thought I was barking up the wrong tree by deleting the duplicated paths, since no change took place.

Also, in my IO window, it never showed or displayed that I was maxed out in buses. Despite the fact that PT had created hundreds of bus paths, the number displayed below it was something like 73/256.

So when a path went 'unavailable', all of a sudden, and I checked the IO box (that shouldn't have been changed in the first place) I saw quickly that I'd only used 73/256 bus paths and that the path in question was still 'active'. That is not very good or accurate information.

'overwrite' was unchecked, yet everytime I opened the session, more buses were created, disabling more and more of my user paths, and creating said 'cascading effect'.

All of this, out of the blue, after months of working in the same session. And also only affecting this one session.

I'd like to know if this is a bug or what I should do to keep PT from altering my IO. I thought disabling 'overwrite' would do that.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

+1 All my busses from 29 to 128 are disabled. I am unsure how to proceed.

Re: bus paths suddenly becoming unavailable
 

Thanks Right Beside !!!

Exactly the same problem here (Protools 10.3.7, OSX 10.6.8).
I thought I was going crazy !!! ... until I read your tip

Thanks for that ! :-)