Muting tracks with no reason

[Alécio Costa]

Hi! This has been happening once in a while recently.
It is a 5.1.1 TDM Mix session. I am playing back so as to record stereo mix from 02R outs ( AES or lite pipe) into a spare stereo empty track at the very same session.
Sometimes one track mutes. So I select stop, play and it playb back normally.

The sessions sometimes is small, let us say with only 9 tracks. Generally I handle much bigger sessions without that happening.

Yes, voices are in auto mode, 512MB RAM on a G4 800QS, no fragmentation.

Sometimes I am using on the bass track the following inserts:
VW > CB2> Q6 >. VW is RTAS, the other two are TDM.

Buffer size is at level 2, utilizing OS 9.2, Mix system ( d24 + dsp farm v2 + mix farm).

Will I need to change CPU usage and so?
Thanks for any info
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[johnwhynot]

Alecio -

Are you absolutely certain there are no automation breakpoints on the tracks that are muting? 1st thing I would check; they will show up if you make the session start time earlier or if you import tracks from another session.

JW

[Alécio Costa]

John, I do not use any automation inside PT. Everything is automated on the console, except for occasional plug-in parameters.
Also, I repass the same part and it plays fine.

[Doug Ring]

Hi Alecio, so by "mute", do you mean the Pro Tools mute light comes on, or does the audio disappear because of a mute somewhere else? Unless it's the latter, I'd go with John's suggestion. Sometimes even though you don't rememeber putting a mute on, they just seem to appear on the mute automation graph.

[Alécio Costa]

Doug, the audio out is muted , not the track itself. Thanks.
Digi?

[Russ M.]

I've noticed this very occasionally. It usuually is one output or recently an aux input that I use for my talkback mic.. It will just disappear for no reason then pop back. It's only happened 3 o4 times in the past year.

HD2
Sys 9.2.2
g4/933
768 mg Ram

[Alécio Costa]

Hi Russ. Which version are ya using? 5.3? 6.x?
Mine is 5.1.1
Digi?

[madlo]

Not sure if this is the same, but I have had this happen sometimes with my system (QS G4 800, Mix Core, DSP farm II, Samplecell, 5.1.3) where it seems to be caused by the DSP Farm--meaning that any tracks that have a plug in that resides on the DSP farm go silent until I remove the plugins--this doesn't happen on the Mix core, though. So you may want to check if one of your dsp cards isn't passing audio. Unfortunately I haven't really figured this one out except that it seems to be plugin related.

[Alécio Costa]

it is funny that even no metering happens at the problematic channel... like it was forzen for a moment, til ya hit stop and play again...

[Shawn Simpson]

Does it ever happen on a channel with no plug-ins?

If not, can you localize it down to a specific plug-in common to the channels doing it?

Losing meter either means it's not playing from the drive, which generally wouldn't result in a mute, but a DAE error of some sort, OR you've got something funky with a plug-in.

See if you can figure out a pattern of commonality between the seemingly random channels muting. That may be difficult since it sounds like a pretty intermittent problem. Good luck with it. Keep us posted.