Upgrading from pc Mbox

[Assaf Gidron]

hello

I am a composer for television and I use protools because of my backround in post production. I work at home, using a PC pentium4 2400Mhz 1GB RAM With Mbox and PTLE 6.1.1.
I work with Reason, Waves Plugins, Native Instruments Plugs and Audio.

When I work on small sessions its ok, but usualy my sessions are big, with more then 20 audio tracks, 16 midi channels, and lots of plugs. I am having latency issues, because I keep getting the message to increace H/W buffer size. but when it is set to 1024 I get messages to decreace it, then to increace again etc... also the work itself gets incredibly slow, the triming of midi notes, and moving things in general. I also have a problem that pressing play works only a third of the times and that the control key stops working as a keyboard shortcut. Overall the work is very frustrating and slow.

I tried to address these issues in different manners, I checked the forums for help, and after all the setup is still slow and clumsy, so I thought maybe I should upgrade.

So the questions I am facing are: will an upgrade to a Mac G5 will solve these problems? Will a G5 with Mbox be faster and allow larger and more complex sessions to run smoothly? Will an upgrade to a faster PC be equivalent to an upgrade to G5? or is it maybe the Mbox that is the problem, in that case will an upgrade to DIGI 002 do any good?

I hope you guys can help...
Thanks
Assaf Gidron

[CrAkD]

these sound like bugs ALOT of people are having problems with PT 6.1.1. your best bet is to either wait for PT 6.1.2. to come out for windows (should be soon) or go back to PT 5.3

[George B]

My Pro-Tools 6.1.1 runs great on my PC, never had a gliche, except when I first hooked it up I couldnt even record because of the H/W buffer errors. It turned out to be my audio drive, it was running in PIO mode and not DMA which was way to slow and it was also bogging down my whole system, so I dropped that one and got a new 40g 7200rpm maxtor drive for 39$ at COmp USA and she runs like a stallion. Its never crashed on me or had an error since.

[Bastiaan]

Asking here wether a G5 will do awayu with your problems....tricky...

Bur seriously. I think not that many can answer that question because they dont use G5's...

What also is something to consider is a mackie UAD-1 or TC powercore. This is a PCI-card with DSP on them, and they cpome with special VST-plugins. Because of that you are also going to need the VST/RTAS wrapper, and although they had propblems with these cards before it seems they resolved the problems.

If you run a card like this your PC isnt put to work to to the calculating for the plugins, but that is done on the dedicated DSP-card. Therefore you can still run on the lowest buffersize (128 samples).

wrapper is around $80, powercore and UAD around $500 (and a bunch of plugins is included).

Keep in mind that only the specially designed plugins will take advantage of the DSP-card.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

these sound like bugs

No they don't - they sound like a system which isn't set up right.

I'd check your paging file size and your Processor Scheduling settings first.. then removing all services except for Microsoft and Digi... and figure out what's wrong with either your XP installation or your hardware.

Then again, you may just be expecting too much from your USB ports... I definately can't play the same size session with my MBox as I can with my 002 on the same system (Mac or PC).

Rail

[Stone Knife]

Yeah, Assaf, I think Rail is right on the money. I have an AMD running at 2.4 GHz and 1 Gig of RAM -and a 20 track count is really not even exercising. No loss of key commands.

So assuming you moved to ANY comparable machine that was set up correctly, Mac or PC you'd probably get a lot better performance, but it wouldn't be necessarily because of the brand name on the case.

[Assaf Gidron]

thanks all!

very helpful...

[Kelso]

You have two HD right? That could be the cause.

I also have a problem that pressing play works only a third of the times and that the control key stops working as a keyboard shortcut.

That could come from the Waves plugs: if one is open and activated, the keys and shortcuts are made inactive (and this sucks).