Spinning Beachball of death when i hit record

[Jonothon77]

Digi 003, PT 7.4, G5/OS10.4.11 2.5g memory

system used to work fine, but suddenly when i hit record, system hangs up to a minute with the spinning beach ball. I found a workaround, which is to select the area i want to record and it goes instantly into record. if i forget, i have to sit and watch it hang until it finally goes into record. i've trashed all the prefs files and played with different playback engine settings, still the same problem.

this happened once before. as i recall, i went thru the same trashing/fiddling and it cleared up. but now it's back!

help!

[tamasdragon]

It can be some os thing too. Have you tried onyx to maintain your os?
And 2.5GB ram may not enough. Are you only using pt on this machine? If other apps are used before, maybe it's a good idea to restart before pro tools work.

[Craig F]

most likely: you have Record Allocation in Preferences set to Open Ended, try something like 5~10 min.

[rafukyo]

Trash your prefes using the utility at the head of the DUC on the sticky part.

[The Dougfather]

Make sure you are recording to a dedicated audio drive and not your system drive.

[Jonothon77]

yup, recording on a separate drive, trashed all the prefs, i've played with different settings in record allocation, fresh restarts, all that. nothing works.

[KRAFT]

Running the same system with less ram and have not had this problem. It sounds like a memory issue to me. I used to get this with my ibook g4 when recording 18 tracks. Maybe check your memory status to see if all is well.

[JazzyJ]

I would try re-formatting the audio drive (ie. drag files off audio drive, format audio drive, drag files back on audio drive) or defrag the drive using 'Drive Genius' ( not recommended by Digi but I've never had a problem with defrag)

When the audio drive is slow, the spinning beach ball is always about.

Also, check if elastic time is enabled on tracks as this will eat a lot of power if all the tracks are enabled.

You can test the performance of the audio stream by using another drive with the same session etc., or even try playing the song from the system drive to check if the same beach ball experience continues.

Failing that. Do a fresh install of PT.