"Can't get audio from the drive fast enough" -9073

[mingojr]

I'm having the popular "Can't get audio from the drive fast enough" -9073 error in Pro Tools. This happens on bouncing and sometimes just playing the track. Always happens on 100 track songs, and frequently happens on even 30 track songs. If I move the session to the internal hard drive it then works fine.

Has anyone had any luck beating this problem??? I've heard about replacing firewire kext files to an older version (10.5) but i can't find those files anywhere. If anyone has them it would be great if they could share them.

Here are my specs.
Mac OS 10.6.8
Pro Tools 9.0.6
iMac 2.5 GHx i5
12 GB RAM
External Lacie 7200rpm 500GB Firewire 800 drive with 75% free space.
Time Machine turned off
Pro Tools Open ended recording set to 20 minutes.

Deleted my PT preferences, ran a kExt utility program, repair permissions on system drive. Haven't tried defragging the external drive but do have a Defrag program if people have found that useful.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Meads]

Is your Lacie a USB drive?

[mingojr]

Sorry should of mentioned it's a Firewire 800 drive.

[Meads]

Did you format it Mac OS extended (journaled)?

[bradch00]

Is your interface (MBox 3?) daisy chained with your Lacie and (if so) have you tried changing the order?

[mingojr]

Originally Posted by Meads

Did you format it Mac OS extended (journaled)?

Yes...

It does it on another disk as well that is formatted MS-DOS (FAT32)...but that one only seems to happen on really large sessions.

[mingojr]

Originally Posted by bradch00

Is your interface (MBox 3?) daisy chained with your Lacie and (if so) have you tried changing the order?

The mbox is on it's own hub through a thunderbolt to firewire adaptor.

The hard drive is on the firewire on its own but there is another hard drive daisy chained to it.

Thanks

[Darryl Ramm]

And describe what is in your session, sample rate, how many audio tracks? plugins, VIs etc.

There are no VI samples on the external drive right?

What is the other hard drive used for and can you remove it to see if it improves things?

Does this happen in other sessions or just this one? Can you try creating a new simple session with not much in it (import content from the existing one for a test) and see if it happens to that.

Beside marking the entire lacie drive private to avoid Spotlight indexing, you can also try marking all other drives you have as private as well. And have you done all the other systems optimizations? including disabling time machine, bluetooth, WiFi, etc. be sure to do every last one for now, at least while you are debugging things.

---

BTW you should never use FAT-32 as a Pro Tools filesystem, it is not supported/known not to work/cause problems.

[mingojr]

Thanks for the response session is 39 tracks include buses master, midi tracks, instrument tracks, audio tracks, etc. It's 44.1/24 bit. It has Omnisphere, Kontakt for Vst. Plugins are Lo-fi, Fabfilter Pro-Q, CLA-76, CLA-2A FabFilter Saturn, H-Delay, SSLComp, FabFilter Pro-L, NI RC48 verb, EQ7B, Soundtoys PanMan...That's it.

I'm not sure what VI samples are...but i'm guessing no because the only things on the drive are Pro Tools sessions.

I unhooked the other hard drive and it didn't seem to change anything.

It happens in a bunch of different sessions.

I don't know what you mean by marking the drive private but i'll google/look into it.

Time Machine, wifi are off. Bluetooth is on because of a wireless keyboard.

Thanks for all your input!

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

And describe what is in your session, sample rate, how many audio tracks? plugins, VIs etc.

There are no VI samples on the external drive right?

What is the other hard drive used for and can you remove it to see if it improves things?

Does this happen in other sessions or just this one? Can you try creating a new simple session with not much in it (import content from the existing one for a test) and see if it happens to that.

Beside marking the entire lacie drive private to avoid Spotlight indexing, you can also try marking all other drives you have as private as well. And have you done all the other systems optimizations? including disabling time machine, bluetooth, WiFi, etc. be sure to do every last one for now, at least while you are debugging things.

---

BTW you should never use FAT-32 as a Pro Tools filesystem, it is not supported/known not to work/cause problems.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mingojr

Thanks for the response session is 39 tracks include buses master, midi tracks, instrument tracks, audio tracks, etc. It's 44.1/24 bit. It has Omnisphere, Kontakt for Vst. Plugins are Lo-fi, Fabfilter Pro-Q, CLA-76, CLA-2A FabFilter Saturn, H-Delay, SSLComp, FabFilter Pro-L, NI RC48 verb, EQ7B, Soundtoys PanMan...That's it.

I'm not sure what VI samples are...but i'm guessing no because the only things on the drive are Pro Tools sessions.

I unhooked the other hard drive and it didn't seem to change anything.

It happens in a bunch of different sessions.

I don't know what you mean by marking the drive private but i'll google/look into it.

Time Machine, wifi are off. Bluetooth is on because of a wireless keyboard.

Thanks for all your input!

Marking the drive private is how you normally disable timemachine indexing. Describes in the standard optimization instuctins. If you have not doen that how have you disabled time machine?

Oh you are running Kontakt. That is a mother of sample based VIs. The samples used by Kontakt should normally be on the boot/system drive or on a separate drive used for samples (never on the audio/session drive). Can you confirm where exactly they are

Do all sessions you tried have Kontakt in them? Try disabling the Kontact plugins in a session. Does that help? Try opening a session with all plugins disabled File>Open>... while holding down the shift key.

What are all your playback engine dialog panel settings?

Try creating an empty session and importing a few basic audio tracks into it. Does that work?