PT11 - Error "Session must be on an audio record volume"

[gondor1976]

Good morning, Darry, Christopher,

Thank you SO much for all this help! There is a lot of information in your posts, and I will try everything you say after work, when I came home.

It is a pity that I have to leave now, but this afternoon right away I will try everything, and of course I will keep you both posted with screenshots of what I do, and I will compilate all the info you ask me for.

I am very very grateful for your posts and incredible help, many thanks again!

[gondor1976]

Good evening UK time Darryl, Christopher. I started to check all the possible problems, one by one, as you suggested, Darryl. I started with this:

Are you absolutely sure the path of the session file in the Workspace is the same as in the finder? There are no strange characters in any path name?
How exactly are you "opening the session in the workspace"? You mean just going File> Open and then navigating to the session file?

When you say you cannot open sessions from the finder. Exactly how are you tryign to do this and exactly what happens?

And you were absolutely right! the name of the drive was: "ÜnoCreations Studio". I changed the "Ü" for "U" and suddenly... everything works! I can open files again.

ProTools 10 never had that problem. Now I know I must be more careful.

What sessions files listed there have this problems and which are not (that's key info).

Are you sure your account has Administrator privileges? (set in the Preferences . Users and Groups Prefpane)

You can try creating a new Account with administrator privileges, log in there and and try opening the same session files from the finder.

Attache a screen shot of the Disk Utility with the volume containing your session file highlighted/selected in the left column, like the attached screen shot (here only one drive so trivial, but you need to select the volume your session files are on). I want to see all the info show for hat voluem in the bottom of the window.

The account I use has administrator privileges. There are no other accounts in this computer yet, as I am the only one who uses it. Please find attached a pic of the volume where I have my Protools audio files & folders and the libraries, and please feel free to give me some feedback about the properties (and about the two crap external HDs... I thought they were good... mistake!)

Why are you running 10.3.7 on OS X 10.7.5? Its qualified on OS X 10.8.4 (and many folks are running it on 10.8.5 as well).

Why are you running Pro Tools 11.0.3 on OS X 10.7.5? Let alone a co-install, the requirements there again is OS X 10.8.4, (but again lots of folks are running 10.8.5).

I no idea if this is causing your problem, but you really need to get your system up to date and properly configured. I would *strongly* encourage you to completely wipe your OS X disk and install a full clean mountain lion install (I personally suspect 10.8.5 is OK, I know some folks are reporting rare problems) and then do a clean Pro Tools 10.3.7 and 11.0.3 install.

The only reason Darryl is that everything was working absolutely fine, until I started to use ProTools with very heavy plug-ins such as Komplete, or Omnisphere. They are amazing purchases, but PT10 only could use 4 GB of the RAM I have installed, and I started to feel very limited... that was when I thought of an upgrade of PT.

I always thought that with my old MBP, an upgrade to Mavericks or 10.8.4 (specially with mi i5 chip) would leave the processor shaking and lacking for power. Do you think I should consider it? the physical replacement is not an option in my case, but I would be more than happy to try a clean install in the HD I am using now. I have everything backup-ed, so maybe worth giving a try? I would really love to know your opinion.

And I hate to break it to you but those cheap WDC MyPassort drives are likely 4,800 rpm or 5,400 rpm and don't meet the Pro Tools Audio drive requirements. And worse they likely have nasty WDC "green" features that are notorious for causing problems with Pro Tools. So if you are not having a bunch of DAE errors with it you are likely just been lucky so far (or have "ignore errors" set and may be getting audio glitches in your sessions you are not noticing... yet). I would open the nearest window and throw that junk drive out it.

As above, you've got to get your system properly configured, go buy a 7,200 rpm external HDD or an SSD or repurpose your current boot/system drive as an audio drive as mentioned above (just install it in a USB2, USB3 and/or Firewire 800 dock). Vendors like Glyph, G-Tech, OWC and Lacie make suitable HDD and SSD models. Personaly I'd only look at an SSD drive nowadays, but if a vendor does not clearly mark an external HDD as being 7,200 rpm it's a bad sign. Broad market/consumer focused vendors like Seagate and WDC seem convinced the external drive market is an opportunity to sell their slowest cheap crap HDDs to unsuspecting consumers. Avoid at all cost.

Well you are absolutely right... I did not have the "ignore errors" option selected, but I have been suffering of glitches and DAE errors, and I honestly thought it was because of my computer... not anymore. I will check prices and options of reliable 7200 rpm external HDD in the brands you have suggested. That is definitively an option.

Following your advice, maybe I can have all the audio files and folders in one of the external devices and all the libraries in another. Do you think I can use any of the WD drives still for the libraries? Or are they so bad I should not even think about it?

I'm still not following *exactly* what is happening here, what exactly is begin done and exactly what happens, but making one obvious guess.... if you are trying to just double click on a .ptx file icon in the finder to open that session in Pro Tools and it is not working....Then in the finder Control-Click on that file icon and go to "Open With..." in the pop-up menu. What is shown on the ... (default) line? if it is not Pro Tools.app then select "other" and navigate to Pro Tools.app and check the "always open with box" once you select Pro Tools.app. Does double clicking on that session icon now open it in Pro Tools? And you've got to navigate to the right version of Pro Tools.app (for 10 or 11) that you want to open that session when you do this. That might possibly be a part of this problem.

What I have done Darryl is copying the PT11 .app of my upgrade directly into the AVID directory\ProTools folder in Applications, after uninstalling PT10, so it is only one version installed, 11. I am going to try to have all my 32 bit PlugIns rewired in PT11 with Reaper 64 (which I am testing at the moment), so I still should be able to use them. I am not very successful at the moment, Reaper crashes all the time, so I think you are absolutely right when you say I urgently need a system clean-up, before trying to get all these things.

Gondor1976 : You are in Great Hands with Darryl and I am sorry I couldn't help out more this time but we are a great community and we do what we can to assist eachother so post the answers to Darryls questions and hopefully we can sort this out.

I have to blame the JetLag after flying back from Santa Barbara during the Thanksgiving weekend and just landed in Amsterdam on the way home to sweden so again Thanks a million for helping out and I will let you handle this Darryl

I really want to thank you, Darryl and Christopher, for taking the time to answer to my post and give me such a fantastic and useful feedback. It seems to be, indeed, a great community, and I really hope I could start helping as much as you kindly did so generously in this my first post yesterday.

Again, thank you so much. And looking forward to your replies.

Javier