Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Been searching/posting on the forum, have contacted digi via phone a few times, so if I'm missing something obvious that has already been posted, please forgive the repetition and pass on the link.

We've been having serious "spinning beach ball" issues continually for the last couple of months.

Our system is as follows:

OS 10.3.4
PT 6.4.2
G 5 original dual
2 gig ram
Accel 3
digi qualified ext firewire audio drive (7200rpm etc.)
-we've tried various qualifying drives

The problem for us, is that we get the spinning beach ball when we come out of record, seemingly more often when we're in quick punch. It's fairly random, doesn't happen every time, and so far can't be traced to any single action or session. When coming out of record after tracking a take we get the ball for a few seconds and then the system returns to normal. In almost every case we are either recording a single mono track or a single stereo track... i.e. never more than two channels of audio... 24/44.1 sessions. We do have plugins running on other tracks, but never enough to stress the system. Sometimes we have reason running, and this will happen when bouncing reason tracks via rewire. But it also happens when we're tracking vocals and reason isn't open.

The other day, we had to go to another studio to record drums (Sage and Sound in LA... has anyone been there?... AWESOME outboard gear and good API... across the street from Cello... on Gordon) and ran the same sessions on a rented mixplus g4 6.4 system. We tracked 10 tracks of drums... punched in... the whole nine yards... and NO BEACH BALL. So how is it that we're getting this problem w/ our top of the line rig and not on the lesser rig.

Also, now that we're back at our studio, cutting up the drums... we get beach balls while using beat detective, specifically while we're manually assigning slices to sections of the drum takes.

We changed the maximum record allocation (set to 5 min) tried using smaller firewire partitions none of this has helped.

The only thing that comes to mind is that perhaps there is something going on w/ os x in the background... this computer is hooked up to the web... although we're not surfing while we're working...

anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks in advance....

AJ

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Do you have an Airport card installed in your machine ? If so switch it off. Sounds to me like a resource conflict. Are you seeing the same problem with freshly partitioned drives ?

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

There is no airport in this machine, however, it is connected via ethernet to a base-station. Our next logical step is to physically disconnect it, although it I can't imagine why this would be a problem for such a powerful machine, unless it has something to do with the way the OS is interacting with a network connection in the background.

I've never had a problem like this on OS 9.2.2 w/ mix plus systems that had internet connections, nor with Nuendo Cubase or logic systems.... granted, apples and oranges, but this is supposed to be a top of the line rig and there has to be a setting or something.

Again, the part that is most peculiar, is that the same session, with the SAME firewire drive, did not exhibit this problem on a G4 mix plus system running PT 6.4

Thanks for the ideas... keep em rolling:)

best,

AJ

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Well, I'll throw out the same old horsepower booster I always do. On G5's there's an extra option under "System Preferences" / "Energy Saver" / "Options" that's called "Processor Performance". You can select "Highest", "Automatic" or "Reduced".

Automatic is supposed to shift into high gear when you need it to, but according to one of those Macfreek magazines, you actually get quite a bit of extra go from setting it on Highest.

The problem you're having sounds like more than that will cover, though. Sounds more like a fragmented drive. I've started keeping my sessions on external storage so I can keep the drive clean. It really helps a lot.

I know these are obvious, but is there some disk in the optical drive, like a movie or something? Is bluetooth off? All kinds of sharing are turned off? Does anyone know if these things help anyway?

And I'm not sure, but isn't a Mix Plus a DSP farm system or something? And wouldn't that mean that it's not running all the audio through the CPU? If so, I wouldn't be surprised that it outperforms your system. Running all that audio through the processor has got to be a pretty steep task. And just think, how does all that information get through that little firewire cable? Going both directions too boot!!! It doesn't exactly look like a 12 channel snake!!

Before I bought it, I thought that with a dual 2 G5/3.5 G RAM and a dedicated 200G 7200rpm SATA drive connected to an 002rack, I could track at 24/96kHz without ever having a problem, but it seems like there's always an issue.

Perhaps in the next generation of macs/PC's/PTLE setups, we'll get there. I hope everyone at digi is staying up a little later working on addressing 64 bits!!! (heehee)

Max

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

when you went to track drums, did you use the same hard drive?

you may have a problem drive...or its directory could be screwed up. try "disk warrior", it has saved my arse a few times. you can rebuild the directory and optimize the drive. or, more drastically, copy everything off of it, and do a low-level format.

did you try recording to anothet drive? borrow one...

i am very suspect of firewire for audio -- i have lots of problems. no problems with my scsi's on my ATTO card.

also, did you try repairing the permissions in disk utility? that often fixes sluggish OSX situations.

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Try removing all the RAM except that which came with the machine. (ie Apple installed RAM)

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Try disconnecting from the network and having sharing etc off. I see this problem on networked macs at work. Seems to be an OS X or unix thing while it "looks" at the network.

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Here's some basics that are easy to overlook...

Make sure you don't have Norton (or any other) disk utilities running in the background. I've seen cases where just having Norton disk utilities installed caused similar behavior. Usually the spinning ball will be followed by an error -9060.

If your issues are specific to one drive, make sure you have formatted your drive with the OS X Disk Utility and that you have disabled "journaling". On the outside, you might try trashing the "Digidesign Databases" folder on that drive as well.

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I'll try to answer back to you all in a one big group:)

Performance on the G5 has always been set to Highest, NOT Automatic. We're running an Accel 3 system so it's not PTLE... it's PT 6.4.2... also, we used the EXACT same firewire HD to track with at Sage and Sound and didn't have any problems on the rented MixPlus g4, so that seems to rule out the possibility of that drive being the problem. Also, we had the same problem with other drives on this system, so it's not a problem we see with only one drive.

File sharing has always been turned off. We don't have Norton running on this computer, and we always format with journaling turned OFF... i.e. NO journaling on our audio drives.

DaveEQ, would you mind going into a little more depth about how you see this problem at work? Thanks:)

AJ

Re: Going NUTS w/ Spinning Beach BALL... pls hlp
 

AJ,
Yeah, I work at a school which has mainly macs networked. Every machine which has been upgraded to OS X often does the spinning ball thing. One of our techs advice was that its partly to do with the way Unix (basis of OS X) looks at information over the network (even when it doesnt have to, it sometimes checks data remotely over the network, even if the current task is all on local drives).
This is not a PT specific issue. It happens in many applications.
Not sure if its related to your prob, but thought disconnecting would answer one way or the other?
dave