PT11 crashes and is horribly slow

[praskal]

1. That beta focusrite driver worked. Now I can hear the click track, I can record. Excellent. thanks.
2. But when I play back, I cannot figure out how to get the track sound into my headphones (which are plugged into the 18i8). I hear the click track upon playback, but not the recorded track.
3. The external HD is My Passprt Slim 1TB.

Patrick

[Darryl Ramm]

Most WDC external drives are just awful for Pro Tools. They usually contain slow "green" drives that spin at speeds like 4,800 rpm and worse do ugly power management tricks that are toxic to Pro Tools. WDC go out of their way to obscure what actual drive and drive are packaged inside these enclosures. Any time a vendor does that, wants to hide information and assume its customers are idiots... then run, don't walk away.

A Pro Tools audio/session drive it really should be a 7,200 rpm or faster HDD or a good SSD like a Samsung 840 Pro or Evo SATA drives or a Lacie USB3 SSD drive. If you want a HDD not an SSD then companies like Glyph, G-Tech, OWC make professional/media oriented external HDD that are popular for Pro Tools use. They will notably either spec the drive RPM and/or say the drive is suitable for use with Pro Tools.

Running to a slow drive might work fine for a simple session with few tracks but is likely going to get unreliable as you increase tracks, sample rate or add plugins and VIs.

If your laptop has USB 3 be sure to get a USB 3 external drive with a proper spec HDD or SSD inside, but just getting a USB 3 drive does not mean that the vendor has put a decent drive in it.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by praskal

2. But when I play back, I cannot figure out how to get the track sound into my headphones (which are plugged into the 18i8). I hear the click track upon playback, but not the recorded track.

Now we are back to guessing about your setup. Can't hear in headphones and can hear in monitors? Or can't hear in headphones and can't hear in monitors? Or can't hear in headphones and don't have any monitors connected? Headphones plugged into which headphone socket (they are different).

Track level turned up? Master volume turned up?

But most importantly... you need to read the 18i8 documentation to understand what outputs in the Focusrite the different headphones sockets are connected to, understand the MixControl related settings and set the Pro Tools track or mix to the correct outputs to get to the headphone socket your headphones are plugged into. Now things are working at all this is a time to do some documentation reading.

[praskal]

OMG. Now back to square one. When I open PT11 I get an error message staing that "The selcted ASIO audio device could not be initialized. Please choose another audio device". Then "quit" or "OK". This is ridiculous.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by praskal

OMG. Now back to square one. When I open PT11 I get an error message staing that "The selcted ASIO audio device could not be initialized. Please choose another audio device". Then "quit" or "OK". This is ridiculous.

Relax, you likely have the wrong playback engine selected. Hold down 'N' while starting Pro Tools and keep it held down and then select the correct Playback Engine when the playback engine dialog box appears.

[Shan]

Originally Posted by praskal

1. That beta focusrite driver worked. Now I can hear the click track, I can record. Excellent. thanks.

Good news to hear.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Relax, you likely have the wrong playback engine selected. Hold down 'N' while starting Pro Tools and keep it held down and then select the correct Playback Engine when the playback engine dialog box appears.

Do the above that Darryl suggests.

I also very highly recommend reading this to get you started:

Introduction to Pro Tools

It's a brief 36 pages with lots of illustrations.

Shane

[Katherine_Focusrite]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the thread.

I did find your case praskal and will reply to you again directly just after this.

I am glad everyone here is now finding the beta 2.5b4 driver. http://beta.focusrite.com/releases/f..._usb2_drivers/

This is an odd situation where we are finding that some users of Pro Tools only have better performance on this driver than the full release driver.

Originally it was a follow up to the 2.5b3 driver that eventually became the full release 2.5.1 driver. However once 2.5b4 went live as 2.5 we had some issues with it that had never presented in beta testing and we pulled it back, releasing the prior 2.5b3 as 2.5.1. Thus sometimes if you install 2.5b4 your computer will think it is an older driver than 2.5.1 and sometimes it will not. So make sure to uninstall 2.5.1 if you are trying to use 2.5b4 from your Add/Remove Programs.

I am not a driver programer so I really do not know the exact reason, but in the last month or so I have been trying this alternate out on my Pro Tools customers and have noticed a pattern of it solving odd playback issues such as Playhead not moving at all or "unable to initialize Focusrite USB 2.0 Audio Driver."

I have brought this to the attention of the Development Team for further investigation.

We also think the "unable to initialize" message is actually a rewording of the infamous "ASIO Device Properties have changed" in Pro Tools 11. It seems to appear at all the same times, have the same random infinite loop issues and I haven't seen any "ASIO Device Properties have changed" messages in 11. Possibly a rewrite?

Anyway thank you all for your efforts and directing me to this thread.

Please do feel welcome to contact us directly if your support issues include a Focusrite Interface of any kind. We are happy to help get you set up on Pro Tools.

Kat