Pro Tools 12.8 CPU Spike

[PMF Media]

Wow, just came back to this thread after a few days to see ALL these comments...and seemingly no resolution.

At this point I'd be starting a fresh, clean instal from the OS up and making sure I get rid of ALL the extranious dross that Apple want you to instal, iMovie, Garageband (and all the loops) etc... just as a basic an instal as you can, then instal PT and it's Native plugs - STOP! Now test the system and see what happens, if it's all good start installing 3rd party plugs 1 manufacturer at a time - leave Slate til last as this can be an obvious issue - keep going until the issue rears it's head, at least this way, you'll know where the issue lies... or, you may find that the new system works flawlessly and the issue may well have been caused by gremlins elsewhere either way, you'll know.

All this can be done on a partition or an external drive for test purposes, once you have something that works well, clone across onto your main drive.
Good Luck!

[Guilla]

Originally Posted by PMF Media

Wow, just came back to this thread after a few days to see ALL these comments...and seemingly no resolution.

At this point I'd be starting a fresh, clean instal from the OS up and making sure I get rid of ALL the extranious dross that Apple want you to instal, iMovie, Garageband (and all the loops) etc... just as a basic an instal as you can, then instal PT and it's Native plugs - STOP! Now test the system and see what happens, if it's all good start installing 3rd party plugs 1 manufacturer at a time - leave Slate til last as this can be an obvious issue - keep going until the issue rears it's head, at least this way, you'll know where the issue lies... or, you may find that the new system works flawlessly and the issue may well have been caused by gremlins elsewhere either way, you'll know.

All this can be done on a partition or an external drive for test purposes, once you have something that works well, clone across onto your main drive.
Good Luck!

That's a pain to do. Pro Tools is the only DAW I got that giving me so much crash, bugs, headaches, and late night internet searching.

I have actually a session that is completely unreadable. And I've tried everything (removing plugin one by one, trashing pref, moving the windows, buffer size, dynamic plugin processing, ignore errors, tracks in block view etc...). Nothing worked, the spikes start as soon as the CPU is at 50% according to Pro Tools and is unreadable at the end of the session (where it stays at about 70-80%).
Also the more I create auxes the more it seems to crash. Which is a shame because I know that dispatching plugins through the auxes could helps to avoid CPU spikes.
Pro Tools just don't wan't me to use it.
PT 12.6.1
MBP 2.7 Ghz to 4 Ghz, 8 month old. Sierra 10.12.1
512 Go SSD Internal.
Mixing on 1 To HDD 7200 or 500 Go SSD (same results).
UAD Silver card, all up to date.
Optimized for audio.

[~ufo~]

i'd like to offer my two cents on this.

I have a HD Native system om a 2012 3.33 6 Core Mac Pro.

It ran quite beautifully on PT9 and PT 10.
I could record bands at 96k 64 samples with a few plugs with hardly any issues.
It was very rare that I had to bump to 128 samples because of errors.

Since PT11 my experience has deteriorated significantly, I seem to recall it became unusable to record for me at around 11.7 to the point where I can't reliably record a single track in PT at 96k 64 buffer without even a single plugin loaded. Show stopping CPU errors galore.
I fact, the track count or plugin count don't seem to matter much.
At least, a session recording one track seems to run about as undependable as a session recording 64 tracks. Plug ins is a different story, of course, but I'm getting errors even without active plugins.
Now I've talked to several people are Avid about this and there appears to be an issue between MacOS and PT. It also appears that not every mac suffers from it.
I found out, by chance, that PT runs MUCH better on my machine on Windows 8.1 than it does on MacOS. So I've been running most sessions on Windows for the past year.
I keep updating my Mac Partition, hoping that they've fixed it and I keep sharing my findings with Apple support, but no luck so far.

If you can, I would recommend installing a Win8.1 partition and testing if your system performs better on it. It's not ideal, but it turned my unusable system into a useable system again.

Good luck.