Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

I've been running my current system about a year and a half without much problem. I have a fast separate recording drive. a storage drive and a bulk media drive. I also have Carbon Coby separate backup drives for each of the three.
Also the system drive has its own backup drive.

This is a MacPro 3,1 with 16 gigs of ram running 10.68 and ProTools 9HD. Like I say, it's been running great but lately I've been getting beach balls when I try to load MasterX TDM and some other plugins and also when just moving around the interface during a Pro Tools session. They seem to be becoming more frequent and lasting longer. I've also had some just "Pro Tools has unexpectedly quit" episodes. I have plenty of free drive space.

I'm just wondering if there's some kind of maintenance I should be doing but I haven't or any optimizer I should be running but I haven't. I can't
afford for this to happen in a client attended session.

Any tips would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Steve

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

Trashing PT preferences and the DAE prefs folder sometimes works wonders. A fresh preference file often is enough. Trashing the DAE prefs folder forces PT to re-scan the plugin folder.

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=54888

Also, plugin compatibility is extremely important.

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/e...n&DocType=1083

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

Hi,

Are any of your hard drives external? I had a similar problem where plugins were taking ages to open and beach balls etc and it was an external hard drive gone bad.

I would start by unplugging all external devices USB and FireWire? Even try another qwerty keyboard and mouse? Any USB keyboard and mouse will work for testing purposes. I once had an apple keyboard go faulty with similar symptoms.


Chris

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

Do what PT Lover advised and see if that fixes your issues. PT Lover is pretty reliable in my experience.

Failing in that, do you have the original OS Install disks for your Mac OS?

If you do have them then install the Mac OS system software on an external drive. Then you can run Disk Utility from that drive to Repair File Permissions on your internal drive.

If you don't want to install the Mac OS on an external drive then insert the OS install disk into your optical drive bay, exit all open apps and restart your computer. Immediately when you hear the 'bing' sound hold down the 'C' key on your keyboard and wait until you see the spinning gear on your screen. It will launch the system install disk as the boot disc and then you run Disc Utility from the Utilities menu and "Repair Disc Permissions" from that utility.

If you've been installing software plugs and rearranging things (adding a printer, surfing the web, watching movies on your studio system for better sound LOL!) and haven't repaired disc permissions lately then you should do this diagnostic.

It's all in the link PT Lover posted if I'm not mistaken.

Hope this helps

J Fred in Nashville

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

In going through the checklist I see that my recording drive is formatted as "Journaled HFS Plus Volume" and your checklist states "Pro Tools can not use UFS or HFS volumes." Do I need to reformat my recording drive to make it APM? Is that a choice the "Disk Utility" will offer me? I'm running OSX 10.68 The Drive is an external OWC Mercury Elite Media drive. DU also reports it has a GUID Partition Table. What do I need to do here?

Yeah ur supposed to have them formatted as Mac OS journaled if I remember right - but the manual should refresh our memory

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

don't forget to the general OS things
Permission Repair
and if you turn your system off (as most of us do) the KRON scripts don't auto run
you can for run them, there are a few apps that will help if you don't want to use Terminal, I'm happy with one called IceClean http://www.macupdate.co/app/mac/23860/iceclean
careful it is possible to do damage with it

Re: Too Many beach balls lately. Any ideas?
 

Your hard drive format is fine! Don't change it!

GUID is the correct (ie AVID recommended) partition map scheme for intel-based macs, APM should only be used for older PPC macs.

Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the same thing as HFS+ Journaled and this is the correct format for OSX audio drives - provided it is NOT case sensitive. When the checklist states it does not support HFS drives it is referring to the HFS non-plus format, which was essentially the MacOS equivalent of FAT32. Disk utility doesn't even offer this formatting option any more for large hard drives, although it may still do for on small disks or flash media.