playback delay

[petergoss]

I am running PT7.0 LE on a Powerbook 1.67 processor OSX 10.4.9. When I hit the space bar for playback, it takes nearly 2 seconds to start. The PLAY button flashes and just as it flashes a second time the playback begins. I am only trying to playback 2 tracks, no plugins - just a simple stereo piece.
This would not seem to be a big problem for most users but I am using PT for music playback on a film and I need to hit cues at a given moment. The problem did not exist a few weeks ago and I must have set something but I have tried resetting everything I can think of and I still have this delay. Anyone got any ideas? Could it be my hard drive perhaps - I'm using the internal Powerbook drive.
Thanks
Peterg

[prockmat]

Part of the problem is definitely that you are running your session off of the internal drive of your Powerbook. You'll get much better performance if you run your audio from an external drive. The next issue would be the amount of RAM you are using. I was running PT 6 off of a Powerbook with 512MB of RAM and it was fine. However, as soon as I upgraded to PTs 7, I ran into the same issue as you. I would hit play or record and it would sometimes take as long as 20 secs before it would start. Shortly after, I upgraded my RAM to 2GB and now it runs flawlessly.

[pfo]

What is your DAE buffer set to?

[petergoss]

Hello PFO - currently my DAE buffer is set to 512 samples,CPU 85%. I have experimented with all the buffer choices and it made no difference to this delay. Peterg

[petergoss]

Hello Procmat, thanks, I'll try an external Lacie drive. I'm using 1gb ram at present. Peterg

[PookaStew]

I'm suggesting this even though it's way too obvious and you probably already thought if it: do you accidentally have the 2-bar intro button pressed on the Transport?

[joey santos]

Also, Please check if the files are all in the same frequency rate. 44.1 or 48khz and other. sometimes when we click and drag the files into protools, those files are not converted and stored in your audio folder, although it suppose to flash an error message when this happen.

hope you'll solve this irksome phenomenon.

regards,

JS

[pfo]

Hello PFO - currently my DAE buffer is set to 512 samples,CPU 85%. I have experimented with all the buffer choices and it made no difference to this delay. Peterg

I think you're thinking of the HW Buffer Size. I'm talking about the DAE Playback Buffer. Check out pp 37 in the Pro Tools Reference Guide.

Good luck,
Pete

[petergoss]

Thanks to everyone who replied. I now have the answer and it is an issue for other people to be aware of I think. The session I was using was corrupt - I realised this when I loaded the session onto a friend's laptop and the same delay on playback occured on his PT installation.
However the worrying thing here is this - you are working on a session and you have a problem like this one. Even if you re-install Protools, as soon as you open the corrupted session (you don't know it's corrupt at this moment), you have introduced the problem again and any session you subsequently open will inherit the corrupt settings from the corrupt session. This is an ongoing and insoluble problem until you can get a 'clean' session onto your system.
My friend has now made me a 'clean' session which I can use to start a new session each time. I'm no expert with Protools, so maybe this is already common knowledge - and if it is I apologise - but for me, and several other much more experienced PT users, it was quite baffling.
As usual with software, the solution is simple - it's finding the answer that is the difficult bit.
Peterg