has anyone seen random busses/outputs stop working

[Matt Chan]

in the last week, we attempted to upgrade our systems to PT 6.9.3 in Tiger and found it to be very unstable (many random crashes, sessions that would not open, several new unacceptable bugs with Pro Control...).

so we bought fresh new drives and reinstalled Panther/PT 6.9.1 from scratch. now that we are back, things are pretty much as stable as before except for one persisting error.

occasionally a random bus or output "deactivates itself". for instance, sometimes the centre channel of a 5.1 bus will not pass audio through it but all 5 others channel are fine. i figured a workaround, "jogging" the bus by moving the slot around in the IO setup. sometimes it is a single output and jogging this in the IO setup does the trick as well. but it is frustrating and worrisome since i am no longer confident in these sessions without doing 15 minutes of signal generator testing every day when we begin. the glitches began to occur when we upgraded and have stayed with us after rolling back.

i have a feeling that the sessions are somehow corrupted and i should go back and rebuild all of our mix templates from scratch after this project is done. am also considering starting fresh sessions and importing all of the tracks from the old ones.

just thought i'd check to see if anyone else has witnessed this.

Pro Tools TDM 6.9.1cs3
HD5 System w/64-bit Expansion Chassis
Pro Control
OS X Panther 10.3.8
Dual 2.5 G5s
1.5 GB RAM
192 IO and Sync IO

matt

[minister]

yes, i have seen it.

hd|2 accell
7.1cs6
mac dual 2.5 os 10.4.6

[tomcat]

when protools does something that defies logic, like not passing audio even though the bussing is correct, it is time to trash prefs and restart the computer. This usually fixes irrational behaivior by pro tools.

[Matt Chan]

yes, i've trashed prefs, databases, and repaired permissions but the problem hasn't gone away.

[mfranken]

I'm not sure if this is related but a studio I work at quite often has a problem where when you open up a session some of the busses either don't work or output at a lower level and display what looks like DC in the meters. They found that moving the plug-ins in one or more busses (aux sends) from one position in the send to another will clear the problem. They're running WinXP with PT6.x.

Cheers Mark

[Ken P]

i've had this problem too, XP 7.1HD, and i've linked it to Waves, possibly some other plugs. if i aux send to a bus with verb,for example, sometimes the bus will not pass audio. if i deactivate plugs and reactivate them - not necessarily the one on the bus in question, it clears it up. but this only happens once in a great while, a pain nonetheless...

[CD Productions]

Altiverb does it on my system. The track that it's on stops passing audio if I scrub any track. If I reassign the bus I get audio again.
G5 dual 2 gig
HD3
192
Sync I/O
Mojo

[Matt Chan]

reimporting all the tracks into a fresh new session appears to solve my bussing problems.

we still have a bit of instability with one heavy reel though. we crashed pro tools in a way i've never seen today, it was outputting unpleasantly loud noise (not digital hash), with really strange frequencies in it. it happened when i tried to create a new insert with a waves rcompressor on it. i got a dsp error but we have lots of slots available, according to the system usage window. we recently had one of our accel cards swapped out but i ran digitest and everything checked out....

i reopened this session three times and we got through a quick pass on the third try. so perhaps it is an issue with how the dsp is assigned to the cards. maybe i should have that new accel card checked out anyways?

[reichman]

Had a session today that had a non-working channel in a stereo re-record track. Only the left side was passing audio, the right was not. We closed the session, purged the cache, re-opened, and then a bus had a non-working right channel. Successive restarts and relaunches yielded one good TDM load. We promptly recorded the mix and backed up.

This problem doesn't seem to have anything to do with the size or complexity of the session. Seeing that the HD cards were maxed out, we greatly reduced the TDM DSP usage, and the problem persisted.

Any ideas?

Best,

Nathaniel Reichman
www.nathanielreichman.com

MacPro 3.0Ghz 8-core, 10.5.7, HD2, Pro Tools HD 8.0.0cs3, Euphonix MC Control and Mixes, Soundminer 4, Waves Platinum 6, Audio Ease All-In, Melodyne, SoundToys, Izotope RX

-and-

MacPro 2.8Ghz 8-core, 6GB RAM, 10.5.7, Pro Tools LE 8.0.0cs3 with Complete Production Toolkit, Digi 002R, Control|24, Blackmagic Intensity Pro, eSATA hotswap tower, Baby HUI, Soundminer 4, Waves Platinum 6, Audio Ease All-In, Melodyne, SoundToys, Izotope RX, GRM Tools, PSP, Retrospect...

[kptkarl]

Yes, seen this occasionally. I could never pin it down on plug-ins. I do only see it in systems that have sub-paths set up. Given that...I've always just chocked it up to a TDM/DSP glitch that just happens and restarting the session clears it up.