Pro Tools 11 on mac not showing waveforms

[GTBannah]

Originally Posted by jbjohnson937

If you are importing from an external hard drive the issue you are having is due to the hard drive not being able to process fast enough to Pro Tools 11. I had the same issue. What I did to fix this was make a folder on the physical hard drive called " Pro Tools Imports" you can name it what you want of course and then I proceed to always add the files I want to import into my session in that folder. Import from this folder on your physical hard drive or any other folder on the physical hard drive and this issue is resolved. I hope this helps you!

Thanx for the response!

By, "physical" hard drive, do you mean, the "system" drive?

[Michael Zull]

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.

[KV626]

Originally Posted by GTBannah

By, "physical" hard drive, do you mean, the "system" drive?

Or any internal drive I suppose.

Sometimes I have the same problem with waveforms, I just close and re-open the session, all waveforms are back instantly.

[Oli P]

It has nothing to do with drive speed...but something to do with import.
I imported a session, and got the same problem...but it was a fast RAID drive.

If I processed some regions with audio-suite, they draw fine again.

This is a bug.

[Michael Zull]

Agreed that this is a bug. Oli, what file system are the RAID drives you are having problems with formatted as? I haven't tested thoroughly but I have been having waveform overview and Workspace issues with drives formatted as exFAT or FAT32. I haven't had any problems yet with drives formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled.

[Michael Zull]

Originally Posted by Oli P

It has nothing to do with drive speed...but something to do with import.

Yes, the only time I've had the waveform overview problems was with importing audio.

[Oli P]

All my disks are Mac OS Extended Journaled.

[bdangler]

Any idea if this has been fixed in PT12?

[jawknee]

I frankly don't care if it's fixed in 12. I paid money for 11 and is should damn well work. This isn't some obscure corner case - this is basic functionality. It's not just the overviews - if I try to do anything on the waveform PT11 goes off into the weeds as if it were coded by some novice.

I'm still stuck on an OS 10.8 because if I roll to Yosemite - I won't be able to run PT10 and I can't run PT10 - I CAN"T DO MY WORK.

IS ANYONE LISTENING??? THIS IS A BUG. IT"S BEEN KNOWN FOR MONTHS.

I am so sick and tired of buying an upgrade only to find some other core function is now broken.

And of course - the thread I posted to in March - no longer shows up in my account. The bug was reported 2 years ago.

[jawknee]

This was a bug, but in this particular case - the audio file was being pulled directly from an SD card, not from the disk I thought I'd copied it to.

Unfortunately, I was never able to find the bug number I posted a few months ago describing the problem. Was it fixed in the most recent update? I don't know. I do know the problem existed before reading the audio files directly off the disk (PT10, luckily was able to open the session, and create the overviews).

In this case I went back and did the same process again - and if I explicitly
"copy", rather than "add", the waveforms, PT11 is able to process the waveforms and build the overviews.

I still don't think it should lock up on valid wav files, even if the they're on an SD card - or for that matter, ever. And that it still does as of 11.3.1