Extremely slow playback

[brianpatrick]

HELP.
Digi001 running pt5.3.1 on WinXP.
Pentium4 2.4g ATX motherboard (both are compat.)
512m RAM
2 80g IDE hardrives 7200rpm (RAID controlled)

Sessions playback fine. But when I try to record, the system takes 40 seconds to begin recording. Inside the blue bar atop the transmit window I get a "not responding" message, and then 40 seconds later it begins recording.

Steps taken: I have
- changed the buffer size, trying every setting
- changed the CPU usage from 65% up to 85%
- changed the playback setting from "0" up to
and including "8".
- inside the preferences tab of "Settings" tried
all the processing options.
- ZERO plug-ins inserted.

I've had occasional issues in the past (with a different PC) with the record engine starting slowly, as in taking 6-7 seconds to engage, but this is insane.

This is the first day I've used ny new rig. And if there is a problem with how it is configured I'd like to get it solved. I would welcome any ideas.

Thanks

Brian

[Chris Cavell]

digi doesn't officially support raid. Perhaps this is where the problem lies. Some have had success with it, and others haven't. In my experience, you will notice little improvement in performance from the raid. the redundancy feature is nice, but I get by with regular manual backups. Good luck.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Soounds like an IRQ conflict.. have you checked your IRQ's in Device Manager?

Rail

[QuikDraw]

Two things you could try.

1) Make a selection in the edit window for the length of time you want to record.

2) Set a maximum recording time limit in your PT preferences.

These two items accomplish the same thing. They limit the amount of hard drive space that PT allocates for recording. If you have not set a limit or made a selection PT assumes that you want to record forever and tries to allocate all free space on your recording drive. That can take a long time. Making a selection in the edit window or setting a recording limit allows PT to allocate only the space that you need for the actual recording you need to do.

One other possibility... Pro Tools does not support RAID configurations. The fact that your drives are in a RAID configuration might have a bearing on this problem.

Mike

[DigiTechSupt]

Hello,

If the below suggestions do not work, you will need to remove your RAID setup and connect your drives to a standard ATA controller. Then reformat the drives unstripped.

A delay in recording can be caused by not limiting your record allocation length.

-Open the Setups>Preferences>Operations window and limit the “Open Ended Record Allocation” to 10 minutes or whatever is reasonable.

Also, make sure you do not have 2 bar count off active in the transport.

Mike

[brianpatrick]

Thanks for the advice. I had to set my "allocate time limit" to 5 minutes to drop the record delay to 5 seconds. That sounds severe, doesn't it? And now I'm getting an "increase your buffer size" message every now and then.

How huge of a job is it to reformat my drives, so they are nor RAID? I did not the formatting myself. Do I to reinstall WINXP and all the other system programs? The drives in my last rig where IDE with RAID, using Win98, and it didn't have this problem. Is this something new with XP, that PTLE does not like working with RAID harddrives?