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Old 01-26-2015, 06:15 PM
Michael Zull Michael Zull is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Phoenix
Posts: 249
Default Re: Pro Tools 11 on mac not showing waveforms

I ran into this problem today and was able to figure it out. I was importing some field recordings from my Sony PCM-M10 at 96/24 and the waveform overviews would not calculate. Same behavior as others have seen, the task manager says it's calculating but the bar never progresses and they never show up. This happened on two different rigs, one iMac running 11.1.3 and another running 11.3 (both non-HD), both on OSX 10.9.5. The drive I was trying to work off was an external USB3 5400rpm spinner drive formatted as exFat (yes I know 5400's aren't recommended but I've never had problems running small sessions off of them). I wondered if, in fact, the drive was just too slow to do the job, but then tried another external USB3 drive. This time a Kingston 128gb SSD formatted as exFat and got the same result, waveform overviews wouldn't calculate.

I backed up the 5400rpm spinner and reformatted it as Mac OS Extended Journaled, tried the exact same operation and, voila, the waveforms appeared immediately. I took the same 5400rpm drive and reformatted it as MS-DOS FAT, and again had no problems with the overviews calculating.

With exFat, I've also had problems with the Workspace not being able to see audio files. I can see them in the Import Audio window but they wouldn't show up in the Workspace, even after attempting to rebuild the database. I copied the files to another drive formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled and the files showed up in the workspace immediately.

No more exFat for me with Pro Tools, apparently PT doesn't like them much.

EDIT: Formatting the drive to MS-DOS FAT worked ONCE for creating the waveform overviews. I copied some more stuff back over to that drive and when I reopened the session a few hours later and tried to import more files, the overviews wouldn't calculate. I just reformatted it again as Mac OS Extended Journaled and it created the overviews fine.

Last edited by Michael Zull; 01-26-2015 at 08:34 PM.
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