Spinning Beach ball Before Playback. Help!

[winstonjack]

If anyone can give me some clues here I would appreciate it very much.

Problem: When I press play when I have tracks record enabled, the mac's spinning beach ball appears. The more tracks I have record enabled the longer the beach ball stays. I've cleaned up my computer and deleted preferences. I recently added an API a2d preamp and thus changed some hardware settings, but I wouldn't think that would cause this problem.

If no tracks are enabled, the beach ball will not appear and the audio will play just fine. The problem also appears when I press record, but does not last as long as when I am just playing the audio.

Anyone out there who can point me to a direction that might solve this problem?

[Tweakhead]

Check your prefs for Recording Time. It is probably set to "Open Ended".

This means that Pro Tools is creating massive temp files on your hard drive before it goes into play. The more tracks, the slower the response.

Change this to somewhere around the length of your song. eg 10 mins. In fact just about anything less than Open Ended will help.

[Chmiola]

Seconding Tweakhead's solution. Set your max record time to something shorter.

I've also had this problem when my hard drive is getting full; how are you on space?

[crizdee]

Hi,

I recently had this and it was an external firewire hard drive going belly up!

So any connected hard drive can slow the system down if they have any problems. if you have any firewire or USB drives connected, try un-mounting them before checking

Chris

[Micks_Mix]

And disable Punch Record, if you don't need it!