DIGIDESIGN-Pro tools stopping at 33 minutes

[sean shannon]

I have had a problem develop recently, and I can't figure it out yet. When I play a session, it always stops at the same point, and I have to reboot the mac. 33 minutes in, or almost exactly 1000 measures. Now, I don't have any songs that long, but after a few unwelcome crashes with paying clients, I was letting the sessions play to see if they would just stop, and they do. It seems to stop ramdomly in other sessions, too.

I have rebuilt the desktop, whittled down the extensions to just what is needed, trashed the preferences files, removed all plug ins except digi, disabled Toast, disabled network stuff, unplugged firewire drives, unplugged USB CD burner, defragmented my hard drives, used DAE 5.1.1 with PTLE 5.2.1.....It seems like I have tried a lot of workarounds, but no luck. And the system passes Digitest.....

It's weird, because I trash the preferences, I put all tracks in record, walk away for an hour, and come back and it is still recording. Then I will RTZ and hit play. Sure enough, 33 minutes in, it freezes. Even with Windows XP, it seemed more stable. (Did I just say that?)Of course, I have had the system for 2 years, so I am out of warranty.....

My system:
G4 400
Powerlogix 1GHz upgrade card (this was happening before the upgrade)
704 M Ram
OS 9.2.2
10 G Main drive
60 G Audio drive (IDE)
AGP graphics card (ATI Rage 128 - stock)
Digi001 card
Panasonic DA7 connected via ADAT lightpipe

Is there something simple I am overlooking?
Any suggestions are appreciated.....
Sean

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Are you in QuickPunch and are there any tracks armed when this happens? What's the preference for open ended recording set to?

Rail

[sean shannon]

I have alotted more memory to PT and DAE, increased HW buffer size and CPU usage to max, too. I am not in Quickpunch mode, and it happens when no tracks are armed (record ready). I have no setting for open ended record, it says "use the max space", and I have 55 M free, and the session only has about 8 tracks....
This is puzzling....

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Try setting that value to 60 minutes and see if the problem persists.

Rail

[sean shannon]

I'll try that....I just opened up another session, and it stopped playing at 32:49:something. This is weird. It just makes me think that it will happen every 30 minutes while I'm working. I'll try again, though, and we'll see, thanks....
Sean

[Dinkus]

I had the same problem a few years ago. Yup like clock work, mine was 30 or 31 minutes then BOOM. I traced it down to the Protools Preferance. You have to trash it everytime you close Protools down. You can open new sessions and close sessions but as soon as you close protools down, trash the preferances. It a pain in the butt sometimes but atleast you can record without the client losing his mind every 30 mins. I reinstalled, over and over called tech support, nothing. until recently, I installed again and it all started to work just fine.

[stoogee]

what do you mean? trash the preferences?

and how do you rebuild desktop?

cheers

[dkrz]

Does it stop at 33 minutes if you start it from like 30 minutes? If it doesn't, your post roll time is engaged and set for around 33 minutes. Deactivate it on the transport pallet (expanded).

If your running PT6, Look here as well if your still having trouble:
http://duc.digidesign.com/cgi-bin/ub...;f=24;t=019869

dk

[Rail Jon Rogut]

One other possibility.. and one that I once ran into.. there was a Mac WORM (Virus) which would attack every 10, 20 or 30 minutes.. Seeing as it appears to be time related.. you may want to look for a program called "Worm Catcher" with Google and check your system. I was infected by sharing media with a NY based film company while sharing session data.

Rail

[sean shannon]

Okay, I took out every plug in, re-trashed prefs,
bare bones extensions, passed digitest, alotted more ram to PT, etc. It still stops at 33 minutes about every time. Digi? What could it be?

PS-That computer is not connected to the internet, and it will run all day and night until I open a PT session.