Pro Tools 6.4 & Mac OS X 10.3.5: Slow to play

[Rich Walsh]

I've just made the jump over to OS X and have installed Mac OS X 10.3.5 and Pro Tools 6.4 LE (MBox) on my PowerBook G4 800. I was wondering if anyone had any quick answers to the following before I start trawling for information:

• Compared to my OS 9.2.2/PT 5.2 LE setup on another partition of this machine, PT 6.4 is VERY SLOW TO PLAY. It takes about 3s between hitting the space bar and audio coming out. Under OS 9 it is almost instant. Are there some optimisation tricks I've missed, or is this just par for the course with OS X?

• I've downloaded the PT 6.4 installer from the main downloads page. How do I know if there is a more recent version tucked away somewhere else? What is "CS" by the way? (It's been a couple of years since I've neede to touch my PT system and visit the Digi website!)

• Similarly, I found it very difficult to locate updates to the Factory Bundle plug-ins…

• I can't get Core Audio to work at all. The Digi app launches but always says the HW is disconnected and now says it is missing as well, even though PT itself works (PT wasn't open at the time!). I managed to route iTunes through my MBox briefly at one point but have not been able to reachieve this! I don't think the manual is very clear either…

Thanks!

Rich

[Slim Shady]

1) What kind of hard drive are you using? Is it formatted using Apple's Disk Utility? Check out the OSX optimization thread posted by digidesign that lives near the top of the forum.

2) The downloads page lists the most recent updates at the top of the list, since 6.4 is the most recent one, it's near the top of the list. A "cs" update means customer service update, and usually just fixes very minor problems reported by some users. Threads about these updates are also kept near the top of the forum - read the thread to determine if you need the update.

3) Can't help you with the factory bundles, but plug-ins almost never need updating (unless you're switching OS's) - search this forum for more info on this topic, I'm sure it's been covered before.

4) Did you download the most recent coreaudio driver? what application are you using it with? Again, search the forum for previous threads on this topic that will probably contain the answers you need. Generally, you can almost always find the answers to questions by searching the forum - unless you think you've got a really really unsual 'one of a kind' problem, it's probably been covered before in spades, and you'll get back up and running much faster by searching rather than waiting for replies to new threads.

[tha k man]

Why are you using 10.3.5 ? Do you like experimenting?

[byteme]

Just so you know, I have been using PT6.4 with 10.3.5 and had no problems.

[Rich Walsh]

I read the two posts at the top of the forum; I don't know which of the following made the difference, but PT is now behaving:

• I suspect in my eagerness to check PT was working I'd installed the demo session on my boot drive, which is journalled. I tested again with a session on my audio partition (I had used OS X to partition my internal drive before I started).

• I downloaded the CS5 & CS6 updates (I'd previously only installed the main 6.4 update).

• I repaired permissions on my boot drive; there were a few awry ones.

I'd already done all the other stuff about Energy Saver, etc - that's in the manual! I did wonder though, what's the problem with 24-hour clock?

As for CoreAudio, I think I'd just confused it by trying to adjust the settings in the Sound preferences pane and the Audio MIDI Setup at the same time. A couple of restarts later and it's all behaving as advertised. It's a really clunky solution though... I think I'll just run a headphone jack from the Mac to my mixer as well. It's a shame the hardware can't be shared more elegantly. Oh well, never mind.

By the way, I've had a mysterious MIDI interface appear in my setup since installing PT which is labelled Digidesign and has no ports. Does anyone know what this is? It has a big question mark on it, so the system's not sure about it either!

Thanks.