Pro Tools 11 Saving Freezes for 30 seconds

[JonMiller]

The second you plug in an external device a driver is installed. That's how Plug and Play works. So are you saying no plug and play devices? no Keyboards and mice?

clearly I am being sarcastic. I just RDP'd into the studio computer, there are no floppy drives in device manager and the WD software does not display under appwiz.cpl so it is clearly just a driver.

[JonMiller]

There is no virtual CD software, it is the label the logical drive. For Kicks, I dismounted all external Hard drives that I do not save to anyways, and it still does it.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JonMiller

The second you plug in an external device a driver is installed. That's how Plug and Play works. So are you saying no plug and play devices? no Keyboards and mice?



clearly I am being sarcastic. I just RDP'd into the studio computer, there are no floppy drives in device manager and the WD software does not display under appwiz.cpl so it is clearly just a driver.

And hopefully you know the difference between PnP installing a standard Windows driver and some third party driver... But yes minimize everything non-standard and when you do a clean install test it first as a totally clean as you can get, install just say the graphics driver and needed interface driver, make sure auto update is off, only load needed drivers from the OEM websites, etc. Once it works make a backup and install any other drivers and software needed. Be ultra paranoid. And at times folks certainly need to remove as many USB peripherals as possible when troubleshooting USB interface issues (not likely the case here).

"Just a driver" can be an issue. An installed and loaded driver lets Pro Tools potentially see the virtual device and try to open it, regardless of any other software being present. If the driver is not installed or known not to be loaded (which I think you have checked?), then that is excluded as a potential issue.

[JonMiller]

Correct, but doesn't pnputil allow for the installation of 3rd party drivers from a ROM device, in Windows 7 and above, IE this WD drive. It's interesting that if it is a driver issue, why it does not occur in PT 10, but occurs in 11 as they are using the same driver.

I'm not sure why auto save / save backup functionality and control + S would look for a new save location. That sounds like poor programming. It should verify the location that it is currently configured for and save there. Save As would be a completely different story, but we are not talking about that.

[Darryl Ramm]

Just remove anything that is causing non-standard drivers to load... Why does Pro Tools 11 have a known CD/floppy bug that Pro Tools 10 does not? Because it is different code (a lot of different code). If it is not a plug-in related bug, them nobody here including me likely has any idea what your issue is caused by. But you need to be paranoid and really test with as vanilla/clean install of Windows install when you go down that troubleshooting path. It's not unheard of say for OEM Windows installs with drivers and crapware to cause problems, hopefully you are working from Microsoft genuine media/system builder distribution or similar and not say an OEM recovery DVD-ROM.

[JonMiller]

Yes microsoft genunine software. I downloaded it from their site. I also tried MSDN versions, same issue.

[Bill Denton]

Originally Posted by YYR123

All sessions or just the one currently in service?

All optimizations done? Especially on the hard drives and the GPU.

I had a problem after I upgraded my audio drive to a SSD - a link to my session folder was still pulling up the old session (on the drive, even after I had moved the drive and began using it as a backup drive)
ie. Double check your disk allocation

I don't know how Macs work, but...

With a Windows 7 (or later) machine, if you migrate Pro Tools sessions to a new drive, you do not want to put the drive that originally contained the sessions back into the computer until after you have re-linked the Pro Tools files.

People are stupid, so Windows is smart.

With newer, well-designed software, Windows does not store stuff to a drive letter, it stores it to a specific disk drive. This is partially because of things like USB drives, which can easily have a different drive letter each time you plug them in, and partially because a lot of IT guys hate drive letters!

I haven't needed to know precisely how Windows IDs the drives, so I'll just use some "made up" IDs...you should be able to understand it anyway.

Suppose you have been putting your sessions on the drive you know as your "E:" drive, and which Windows knows as "DISK12345".

You copy all of your sessions to a new drive. You remove your old drive, then put your new drive in the computer. You assign the new drive to drive letter "E:", and Windows assigns the new drive the ID "DISK67890".

Then you put your old drive back in the computer, and assign it drive letter "F:". Since Windows had previously assigned "DISK12345" to your old drive, there is no need for Windows to assign it a new ID.

So you open an existing session from drive letter "E:"...all of your audio files are also on drive "E:". Everything should be good to go, right?

There's just one problem...when you were working on your original session (before you moved it to a new drive), you thought you were saving all of your audio files to drive "E:"...but they were actually being saved to "DISK12345", which just happened to be using drive letter "E:" at that time.

So, when you open a session on your "new" drive, "DISK67890", the session is looking for audio files that are on "DISK12345".

Since you put "DISK12345" back into your machine, even though it is now drive letter "F:", Windows can find the files where they were originally stored, so it just opens them from your old drive and rocks on.

This will only happen if you have both the old drive and the new drive in your machine.

I hope I've explained it okay, and I hope it helps some of you...

[JonMiller]

Hi Bill,
This is not the case for me. It was been on the same drive the entire time.

By the way, I am follow Pittsburgher living in the East End.

Thanks for the tip,
Jon

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

I don't know how Macs work, but...

With a Windows 7 (or later) machine, if you migrate Pro Tools sessions to a new drive, you do not want to put the drive that originally contained the sessions back into the computer until after you have re-linked the Pro Tools files.

People are stupid, so Windows is smart.

With newer, well-designed software, Windows does not store stuff to a drive letter, it stores it to a specific disk drive. This is partially because of things like USB drives, which can easily have a different drive letter each time you plug them in, and partially because a lot of IT guys hate drive letters!

I haven't needed to know precisely how Windows IDs the drives, so I'll just use some "made up" IDs...you should be able to understand it anyway.

Suppose you have been putting your sessions on the drive you know as your "E:" drive, and which Windows knows as "DISK12345".

You copy all of your sessions to a new drive. You remove your old drive, then put your new drive in the computer. You assign the new drive to drive letter "E:", and Windows assigns the new drive the ID "DISK67890".

Then you put your old drive back in the computer, and assign it drive letter "F:". Since Windows had previously assigned "DISK12345" to your old drive, there is no need for Windows to assign it a new ID.

So you open an existing session from drive letter "E:"...all of your audio files are also on drive "E:". Everything should be good to go, right?

There's just one problem...when you were working on your original session (before you moved it to a new drive), you thought you were saving all of your audio files to drive "E:"...but they were actually being saved to "DISK12345", which just happened to be using drive letter "E:" at that time.

So, when you open a session on your "new" drive, "DISK67890", the session is looking for audio files that are on "DISK12345".

Since you put "DISK12345" back into your machine, even though it is now drive letter "F:", Windows can find the files where they were originally stored, so it just opens them from your old drive and rocks on.

This will only happen if you have both the old drive and the new drive in your machine.

I hope I've explained it okay, and I hope it helps some of you...

[JonMiller]

I did some additional experimenting. The only thing I can think of is the "LENGTH" of the session causes the issue.

Typically I track / mix an entire album in 1 session.

[mesaone]

How long is the timeline in the session you've been testing? Pro Tools should be able to have a 24 hour timeline with no issue (not from personal experience, but from the specs)