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

[mingojr]

Ohhh sorry, Time Machine is turned off...not disabled. I'll look into that. Thanks for the tip.

Kontakt and every other sample based program is on my system drive.

There's another session, it does not have kontakt or any vst's in it, only audio tracks and it does it all the time, it's a large session though 100 tracks.

I held down shift while opening to disable plugins on the afflicted session and it still gave me the error during bouncing.

Playback engine is at 1024/4engines/90%/everything else is default.

I started a new session and imported session data from the afflicted session and just bounced down the audio tracks and the error still occurred.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

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?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mingojr

Ohhh sorry, Time Machine is turned off...not disabled. I'll look into that. Thanks for the tip.

Kontakt and every other sample based program is on my system drive.

There's another session, it does not have kontakt or any vst's in it, only audio tracks and it does it all the time, it's a large session though 100 tracks.

I held down shift while opening to disable plugins on the afflicted session and it still gave me the error during bouncing.

Playback engine is at 1024/4engines/90%/everything else is default.

I started a new session and imported session data from the afflicted session and just bounced down the audio tracks and the error still occurred.

Have you tried deleting prefs and databases?

If so then next debug step is to create a new Administrator account on your mac, and log into it and create a test session there. Did that work?

Also 4 CPU is too high on a 4 core i5, you should set his to 3. Not that I suspect that causes this problem at all, but I would make the change. I'd also try the limit at 99% once you do that.


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BTW something like ~ 100 tracks of audio starts to get outside the capacity of a single disk spindle (especially over FW) and you need to be looking at spreading such large sessions across multiples drives. Make sure you are doing tested for now with fewer audio tracks (~10 or so?). There is lots of info in the Pro Tools reference guide about how to utilize multiple audio disks, round robin allocation, etc.

[bradch00]

I did have this on one of my drives (oddly enough a Lacie) and it turned out that eventually the bridging chip totally gave up working (i.e. it would no longer connect through Firewire).

This other drive you had connected, is it "PT friendly"? I mean could you try using it as opposed to the Lacie and see if you have the same issue? (just as an experiment)....

However what Darryl wrote about limits of a single HDA makes a lot of sense.

[mingojr]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Have you tried deleting prefs and databases?

Also 4 CPU is too high on a 4 core i5, you should set his to 3. Not that I suspect that causes this problem at all, but I would make the change. I'd also try the limit at 99% once you do that.

I tried deleting the prefs and db.

Hmmmmm.... I just set it to 3 and 99% and it bounced the track down for the first time ever on the external drive.

Just a random occurrence you think?? I've never bounced this track down before, i had to move it to my internal HD to do it...

I just bounced it down again with no problems.

Hmmm!?

Still didn't help the 100 track session but i completely understand what you are talking about spanning over multiple drives.

Thanks

[Darryl Ramm]

OK so you are on the way. Make sure every last optimization is done. I would personally ditch any Bluetooth keyboard or mouse. And make sure Kontakt and all your other plugs are the latest version (compatible with 9.0.6). And make sure the system is set up properly for Kontakt. NI have optimization instructions for use with Pro Tools.

You may have less IO issues if you 10.x.

If you really want to run large sessions with so many tracks I would be looking at something like the dual drive Lacie Thunderbolt box (use each drive as a single drive not RAID) and get the 7,200 rpm version or SSD version. There are also other empty Thunderbolt boxes you can add your own SATA disk(s) to. If doing that I would go with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. See my other notes on DUC about properly setting up those drives.

[mingojr]

Thanks so much for your input and help.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

OK so you are on the way. Make sure every last optimization is done. I would personally ditch any Bluetooth keyboard or mouse. And make sure Kontakt and all your other plugs are the latest version (compatible with 9.0.6). And make sure the system is set up properly for Kontakt. NI have optimization instructions for use with Pro Tools.

You may have less IO issues if you 10.x.

If you really want to run large sessions with so many tracks I would be looking at something like the dual drive Lacie Thunderbolt box (use each drive as a single drive not RAID) and get the 7,200 rpm version or SSD version. There are also other empty Thunderbolt boxes you can add your own SATA disk(s) to. If doing that I would go with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. See my other notes on DUC about properly setting up those drives.

[mingojr]

Spoke too soon happening again, often.... maybe i should look into a thunderbolt drive.... or PT 10??

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

OK so you are on the way. Make sure every last optimization is done. I would personally ditch any Bluetooth keyboard or mouse. And make sure Kontakt and all your other plugs are the latest version (compatible with 9.0.6). And make sure the system is set up properly for Kontakt. NI have optimization instructions for use with Pro Tools.

You may have less IO issues if you 10.x.

If you really want to run large sessions with so many tracks I would be looking at something like the dual drive Lacie Thunderbolt box (use each drive as a single drive not RAID) and get the 7,200 rpm version or SSD version. There are also other empty Thunderbolt boxes you can add your own SATA disk(s) to. If doing that I would go with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. See my other notes on DUC about properly setting up those drives.

[Meads]

Originally Posted by mingojr

Spoke too soon happening again, often.... maybe i should look into a thunderbolt drive.... or PT 10??

Have you tested the speed of your FW-connection?
Download BlackMagic Disk Speed Test (it's free). Maybe there's something wrong with your port/cable. That way we can find out.

FW800 should give you 60-80 MB/s read and 40-60MB/s write speed.
Anything substantially lower than that points to an issue.

[Glenjb]

Just wanted to throw out that I was having the same issue and realized my Firewire drive was 7200 rpm but it was a "green" drive. Bought a wd black and problem solved. Never had a 100 track session going on but 40 tracks yes which is happening to you.

Also, I put the wd in place of the SuperDrive on my MacBook pro which is faster than FireWire. I used the data doubler from OWC for this. I don't know if you can put more SATA drives in your iMac but check it out and get a wd black if possible.

Hope you get it sorted, hated this error myself.

[Darryl Ramm]

Start by just going over every last optimization and double checking they are all done. How many actual audio tracks do you need in your largest session? How budget sensitive are you? If you can I would go SSD if you can afford it.

I would likely upgrade the disk and Pro Tools. Be careful of your plugin support in PT 11 you need AAX-64 plugins, but you can coinstall 10/11. I would upgrade the external disk first.