HELP: PT LE 8 on Macbook (unibody)...

[AKGambino]

I realize that I have made a mistake and purchased a brand new unibody Macbook 2.0 with a 5400rpm 160gb hard drive. I should have read further into the specifications for Pro Tools 8 LE and I would have found out that I need a 7200rpm drive or an external firewire 7200rpm drive for recording and playback.

My problem is that the macbook does not have a firewire port!

I have successfully recorded a few tracks flawlessly just using the internal stock HD for recording/playback but once I get to about 5 tracks each with 1 or 2 plug ins I start to get the error -9136 which is stating that my cpu is holding off USB audio and that i should reduce the no. of tracks and plugins.

I have the h/w buffer size set at 1024 and cpu usage limit is 90% (both maxed out). I never get any pops or glitches, but when the error pops up it stops playback which is very annoying, also I need to be able to use about 5 times the amount of tracks as i am currently able to.

Basically, I would like to know if anyone has had any success fixing this similar problem. Perhaps, against digi's reccomendations, the use of a 7200rpm external USB 2.0 hard drive? Has that worked for anyone or would I just be wasting my money going that route?

Any help or advice, other than "you bought the wrong setup!", would be greatly appreciated!

Andrew

[The Dougfather]

You've dropped a major clanger here.

Internal drives are suicide regardless of there speed, this is because the drive is also used by the OS.

USB drives are not supported because of the technology used and the CPU overhead.

For the short term it may be worth changing USB ports because typically on macbooks only 1USB port is supported and the other causes the -9136 randomly.

Long term your on borrowed time as far as track counts are concerned.

[TimG.]

Great I found this! I plan to buy a new laptop soon and I was considering buying one of the new macbooks with the 2,0 Ghz and update the hdd to a 7200 rpm one and the RAM to 4GB. So if I understand this right this won't be a suitable machine to work with a Mbox Mini? I definitely will need a firewire-port to run a external 7200 HDD for the audio files with PT8 LE? Is this right?

Has anyone the same or more experiences with PT8 LE and a unibody 2,0 Ghz macbook? My alternative was maybe a DELL STUDIO 15 or one of the business models from DELL. But they seem to have serious latency issues, too.

So what is the best affordable machine for PT8 LE? By the way: I don't have any money to buy a Macbook Pro, so please don't tell me to buy one of these

[andydunham]

There are several options for getting an apple laptop in a decent price range. Firewire is extremely important to have, so the newest macbooks (and even the newest macbook pros) aren't ideal. The previous generation macbooks and macbook pros have worked well for a lot of people. I've got the first generation macbook from 2006 and I haven't had any major problems with PT 7.3 - PT 8. Still gets good track counts and CPU usage isn't too bad either. If it was me searching I would do my best to find a previous generation macbook pro. I know you said you couldn't afford one, but with the release of the new ones, the previous generation went WAY down in price. The reason why I say this is : they have a FW800 and a FW400 port. I'm not exactly sure on what Digi says about FW800 officially, but I use it on my G5 for my Lacie HD and it works great. On the macbook pro it could be your external HD and the FW400 port for your interface. If you don't find any pro cheap enough, look into the previous generation macbooks. Just a thought.

[AR3]

The new White Macbook 13.3 inch screens are compatible with PT 8 LE. It has a FW 400 port and starts at $999.00. The internal hard drive 120 GB 5400RPM doesnt need to be upgraded. Get an external FW 400 drive 7200 RPM and daisy chain it to your interface. Set this up for record/playback and install PT to your internal drive. I researched this and was in contact with Digi support and so far so good everything runs great!

[Droid6]

Here's a nice deal on a MacBook with firewire. LINK