Pro Tools CRASHES my PC

[XyberICE]

Pro Tools FREE crashes my Win98 PC when I record audio after about a minute of record time.

My system is a Dell Dimension 600MHz with 384Megs and a SoundBlaster Live! with the LiveDrive (5.25 bay insert with all the sound connectors on it) and Win 98.4.10.2222 (latest updates). I've tried using both the LiveDrive Mic2/Lin2 (front input) and the Mic (rear input) with the same results. I do get the latency echo that was mentioned here earier, but I can deal with it by just muting the channel. My sound drivers are 4.12.01.0900 (which should be the most recent). The only buffer settings Pro Tools will tolerate are 8192 and 4096 samples. Both still cause a crash. I've even played with the CPU usage to no avail.

Any suggestions?

-Jim

[Sacred Spirit]

You're probably running the bare minimum for a ProTools system. I would back off the CPU to no more that 75 or 80%. Soundblaster is not a nice card and I believe even with full versions of PTLE, your card can cause problems (we often have to disable sound all together). See if your system will handle some basic editing and processing with plugins; record some processed audio to a new track, etc. Just import something you already have.
Are you recording to the OS drive? That too is a nono.

[XyberICE]

Ughh, that sucks. I bought the SB Live just because it had all those features for recording audio. Oh well, live & learn. I had the CPU at 85% last time I used it. I'll back it down to 65% (next lowest on the Free version). I did notice that I could import the audio I had recorded in WaveStudio and playback/mix with MIDI tracks worked fine. That's all I tried. I _was_ recording to the OS drive; I'll switch that as soon as I get back (I assume you mean another physical drive, not a logical/partition drive).


Thanks,

-Jim

[XyberICE]

I transfered all my sessions to another non-os drive and setup the hardware to use the non-os drive to write to. Now ProTools hangs the system EVERY time I try and record audio. I've tried every setting and used several different inputs on my sound card (Line In2, Mic, Mic2) and DAE=0 through 3. My samples are set to 8k and I've set my CPU to every setting between 65% and 85%.

Can anyone help me out here? I have a relatively simple session: 2 audio and 1 midi track.


If not, can anyone recommend a different sound card that is more suited to ProTools and has multiple audio inputs.


Oh BTW, anyone know why ProTools says it can open a Mac ProTools session but fails when I choose one to open?

Thanks,

-Jim

[Bastiaan]

ptfree is well...not a very good program to say the least.

My advice: get an mbox with ptle or some cheap M-audio-interface with pt-mp on winXP. Thats about 2000% improvement