My Personal AAE - 6101 Error

[Darryl Ramm]

So when did this first start happening? What changed? Can you undo that?

How/when did you upgrade to to the macOS/OS X version you are running?

Post details of your setup. Including disks specs and filesystem type, check where the audio file are actually places.

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Keep going forward simplifying stuff and testing and keep combining all tests, e.g. new empty session in new admin account, only with stock plugins installed, after trashing prefs...

Try BuiltIn Output as the playback engine. Leave the playback engine set to that for all other tests.

Make sure you are really optimizing everything, following the correct instructions.

esp. WiFi off and Bluetooth off. Get a wired mouse and keyboard if needed.

I would disable/disconnect all networking. All unneeded peripherals

In addition I would disable spotlight on all drives (mark them private).

Make sure disk cache is enabled (set to a few GB).

Set Dynamic Plugin processing off.

Then trash prefs again, redo all the tests. From new account, with empty new sessions, ...

Look in Console.app system and app logs for any errors or warnings when you are trying to run Pro Tools.

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At that point if you are still having problems you either roll back to a system backup or do a full clean macOS install and test that. Grab a new partition and do a full clean macOS install, install Pro Tools and the latest ILM and nothing else and test. Do not use migration assistant to do anything. A fast external USB 3 SSD may be handy to do that on if you don't have space to shrink your internal boot drive to create a spare partition to install on there.

[Cutlerbri]

As always, Darryl, thanks. I will go through every step of this and report back. Right now I'm on my laptop and away from my studio. But I did want to answer one of your questions right now.

I believe this started happening when I upgraded all three of my Macs to OS High Sierra. I needed to do this in order to get them to all backup to the 3 TB drive I bought to hang off my Airport Extreme. My two Macbook Airs are connected wirelessly and the iMac for my studio is connected by ethernet.

So if the OS is the culprit (we don't know that yet) but might an eventual solution be to uninstall PT, REinstall OS High Sierra, then reinstall PT in that order?

[Darryl Ramm]

You are running TimeMachine backups over WiFi... Be very careful of that crap running when it should not be.

You upgraded the macOS in-situ? That is a bad idea, works OK often, fails enough times as well... A full clean install may help, you will have to tell us...

Timemachine is a very bad choice for system level backup. An OK choice for user level documents/files/sessions.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[CisumBlue]

>>>Timemachine is a very bad choice for system level backup. An OK choice for user level documents/files/sessions.<<<

I have been using Timemachine, but have never had to rely on it to restore anything. Can you expound on that. What would be a good system backup program?

[john1192]

i use Carbon Copy Cloner Only ...

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by CisumBlue

>>>Timemachine is a very bad choice for system level backup. An OK choice for user level documents/files/sessions.<<<

I have been using Timemachine, but have never had to rely on it to restore anything. Can you expound on that. What would be a good system backup program?

For a system level backup clone the boot/system drives using Carbon Copy Cloner. That way you can boot directly off one of the clone backups if there is a problem. Time to recover from total loss of boot drives then is ~ minute. Time machine you might be spending ~hours doing a slow restore over a network... and its a lot more faffing around, and more likely for stuff to go wrong and harder to test... you do test recovery works?

You can clone to other disk drives on the computer, but best to clone to drives that can be removed from the computer and stored in multiple places. You want to think through scenarios that guard against, operator error, theft, building failure, etc. Operator error, i.e. your fat fingers, is likely the most common cause of problems and something to think through how you protect yourself from yourself. Not having the backup you are relying on attached to the computer during normal use is a good start. You also need at least two physically separate backup drives, because the point you discover there is corruption of your current boot drive may be just after it has failed and backed part way though backing up a pile of mess... now your boot drive and one backup are toast. I have ~four separate drives that I cycle though to make bootable backups of each computer. On larger backup drives I'll clone to multiple bootable partitions... if wanting a long chain to provide point in time recovery if lots of things are going on with updates. Two stored off site. Backup mostly to HDD for low cost and long-term reliability, although some of the SSDs I carry also have backup boot images in them).

[Cutlerbri]

Daryll, my two MacBook Airs are for my day job and internet stuff -- NOT for PT. Those are the only two that are being backed up via Wi-Fi. The iMac for the studio is connected directly to the AirPort Extreme via an ethernet cable, and the 3 TB external is connected to that via an ethernet cable. So the studio iMac is not being backed up over Wi-Fi.

But yes, I've been backing up my studio iMac's system drive to TimeMachine (not good?) and all my sessions are on an external 500GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro. I back up the first OWC to a twin OWC MEP via Carbon Copy Cloner.

I did have the iMac's TimeMachine set to backup automatically on the hour. I have now turned that off. That probably wasn't helping.

Here is my setup: Late 2015 iMac i7, 500GB flash drive, 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3, 2X OWC Mercury Elite Pro 500 GB (I'm not sure what "filesystem type" means), Focusrite Clarett 2Pre, Golden Age Pre 73 Jr, Neumann TML 102, KRK Rocket 5 monitors.

My keyboard and mouse are wired. The only peripheral I have is a powered USB hub. Should I disconnect that?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Cutlerbri

Daryll, my two MacBook Airs are for my day job and internet stuff -- NOT for PT. Those are the only two that are being backed up via Wi-Fi. The iMac for the studio is connected directly to the AirPort Extreme via an ethernet cable, and the 3 TB external is connected to that via an ethernet cable. So the studio iMac is not being backed up over Wi-Fi.

But yes, I've been backing up my studio iMac's system drive to TimeMachine (not good?) and all my sessions are on an external 500GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro. I back up the first OWC to a twin OWC MEP via Carbon Copy Cloner.

I did have the iMac's TimeMachine set to backup automatically on the hour. I have now turned that off. That probably wasn't helping.

Yep, it can be spectacular what problems that backup can cause as it happens while you are doing stuff.

You should try disconnecting *everything* you reasonably can. BTW my favorite "hub" for accommodating extra iLoks is the USB ports on Apple or some third party wired keyboards.

[Cutlerbri]

Update on this problem:
The first thing I did when I got back to my studio was to grab an unused HDD and created a bootable image of my Macintosh hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. Done.
Then I trashed prefs, emptied trash, restarted, and started a new session with the new administrator. Before doing that I bypassed my powered USB hub. I started the new session with BuiltIn Monitor as the playback engine. I unchecked Dynamic Plug-in and unchecked Ignore Errors. I set the disk casche to 3g.

I started recording and within 20 minutes of basic tracking it threw the 6101 error again.

So by bypassing the USB hub and using BuiltIn Monitor as playback, does that mean I'm eliminating the USB hub and the Focusrite interface as sources of the problem?

And what should I try next? Is it time to uninstall PT and the Mac OS, and then reinstall the OS first and PT second?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Cutlerbri

Update on this problem:
The first thing I did when I got back to my studio was to grab an unused HDD and created a bootable image of my Macintosh hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. Done.
Then I trashed prefs, emptied trash, restarted, and started a new session with the new administrator. Before doing that I bypassed my powered USB hub. I started the new session with BuiltIn Monitor as the playback engine. I unchecked Dynamic Plug-in and unchecked Ignore Errors. I set the disk casche to 3g.

I started recording and within 20 minutes of basic tracking it threw the 6101 error again.

So by bypassing the USB hub and using BuiltIn Monitor as playback, does that mean I'm eliminating the USB hub and the Focusrite interface as sources of the problem?

And what should I try next? Is it time to uninstall PT and the Mac OS, and then reinstall the OS first and PT second?

I'm not sure what the hub is USB hub is doing or what it has connected to it, if in doubt just unplug it, physically unplug as much stuff as you can. Make sure all optimization steps are done, every last one. W've seen folks surprised again recently that WiFi can cause 6101 errors... make sure WiFI is disabled in the task bar (disabled="Turn WiFI OFF" (WiFi icon in the task bar is then an empty arc) not just not connected... in which case the Mac keeps searching for WiFi networks).

By using BuiltIn Output as the playback engine you are excluding third party interface hardware or (more likely) driver issues. But again unplug stuff, rogue hardware can spray the system with interrupts and cause problems.

What IO buffer size are you running at? Find the size where things becomes *not* stable and try all the different different tests to see if that gets better or worse.

What you do in what order is a matter of trying to reduce the overall time spent. At some point it's worth jumping to a full clean reinstall and seeing if that is stable, if not then then looks a lot more bleak, but you can try resetting PRAM, further looking at hardware for issues etc. Or by then being really convinced the problem is a core issue in Pro Tools/standard plugins.