PT11 "First test" or "how much is epic?"

[Holly73]

Coming from PT9 I yesterday installed the PT11 demo (and also the bundled 10 for comparison).

I was looking forward to try it, as PT9 was less than stellar when it comes to performance and stability compared to competitor's products on the same machine. But now, after the complete rewrite and kicking the legacy code everything should be...

Started a new session, created 3 stereo instrument tracks and put there Boom, Vacuum and Xpand2. Recorded 4 bars on each track and bam... got a pop-up window telling me "(-9173) Running out of CPU power. Try removing some native plugins".

At this point, the CPU meter was somewhere around 12%.

After a while, the next error hit me. This time "(-6101) CPU-Overload. Increase HW buffer size or try to remove some plugins". It was still the same session, but with an added ChannelStrip and a delay. CPU still around 13% or so.

But this message made me wonder. Wasn't the HW buffer settings supposed to be just the input buffer and playback buffers should be handled by PT independently?

I decided to take a look to the PT11 Reference Guide (page 50):
Higher Hardware Buffer Size settings are useful for sessions that are using more Native plug-ins for playback. These settings allow for more audio processing. They can also be useful to reduce errors on machines that require a higher buffer size.

How was this again with the independent buffer sizes?

I also tried to run the PT10 demo song. Was a hit and miss in PT11 (same errors as mentioned above), while it was running perfect on PT10 at a buffer of 512, 7 Processors, 95%.

My system for this test: iMac i7 2.8, OS X 10.8.4, not optimized for PT (as it isn't my main rig). But other DAWs smoke on this computer and I was hoping for PT 11 to be finally up there with the competitors, but it doesn't seem to be the case. It uses a few % less CPU, but is generally the same picky like my PT9. It also still ignores the "ignore errors" setting in the playback engine dialog.


And some more (but minor) problems:

• Like other users, I get the "allow incoming network connections" popup

• I can't open the help (Reference Guide etc) from within PT

• The German translation is horrible and makes it nearly impossible to find things. Needs an option to switch to English without using scripts or switching the whole OS.

Conclusion: not impressed! And the answer to "how much is epic?" seems to be: 2

[Carl Kolchak]

Were you running your session on the system hard drive?

Is it 7200rpm or 5400rpm?

Quite often it seems that "CPU power" pop ups are more directly caused by not using a dedicated audio drive, to run your sessions off.

That said, you did mention that you haven't optimised your computer at all, and I don't believe OS X 10.8.4 is officially supported of Pro Tools at the moment (it may work???).

[Meads]

Originally Posted by Holly73

• The German translation is horrible and makes it nearly impossible to find things. Needs an option to switch to English without using scripts or switching the whole OS.

I guess this won't be possible without a script. They didn't let you change language in 10. Same now. So I guess it's always going to be like that.

But there's a simple solution:
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=340183

This worked perfectly fine for me with 10, and same now with 11. No big deal.

[Holly73]

Originally Posted by Carl Kolchak

Were you running your session on the system hard drive?

Yes, it was the iMac's 7200rpm system drive. My dedicated workstation has an audio drive, but I need to record with it tomorrow and therefor only tried it on my iMac.

Originally Posted by Carl Kolchak

Quite often it seems that "CPU power" pop ups are more directly caused by not using a dedicated audio drive, to run your sessions off.

I know, but first of all, there was no audio involved in the VI test and the PT10 demo with more than 30 tracks played back very well on PT10 from the same system drive. I thought they already improved the disk engine (or whatever it was called) in PT10. And the disk meter was at 0 during the VI test and around 20% with the PT10 demo.

Originally Posted by Carl Kolchak

That said, you did mention that you haven't optimised your computer at all, and I don't believe OS X 10.8.4 is officially supported of Pro Tools at the moment (it may work???).

I installed Mountain Lion in order to use PT and all I got was 10.8.4. And I saw some here recommending 10.8.4 even though it isn't qualified yet.

I know I could do some things better in this test, but it was good enough to see that PT is still more picky than other DAWs and the improvements from 10 to 11 aren't "epic".

[Carl Kolchak]

Well then I guess you have discovered the true meaning of :

"Next Level S*1t"

[Holly73]

[Park Seward]

Sorry for your problems. I get the exact opposite result on a MacPro with 10.8.4 and PT11. The demo runs fine with a high of 7% cpu usage.

Maybe something is not right with your Mac???

[Holly73]

Ok, I need to revise my opinion. I connected am external harddrive and this really seems to be the key.

Now I played the PT10 demo track still with around 12%, but no hiccups anymore. Quite responsive and smooth.

Then I played a recent recording of mine. 41 tracks, no FX until now, as it isn't mixed yet, but the CPU meter stays at 2%. Impressive!

Even better: it doesn't make a difference what the HW buffer is set to. So, maybe the advertisements of Avid have been right and the Reference Guide and the popup alerts are misleading.

The problem with the language: it can be fixed using the script Meads linked to. But still I'd prefer an onboard solution, as right now I closed PT and forgot to start it using the script, but by double-clicking the session and there it was again in all it's glory: the German GUI.

[Meads]

Originally Posted by Holly73

The problem with the language: it can be fixed using the script Meads linked to. But still I'd prefer an onboard solution, as right now I closed PT and forgot to start it using the script, but by double-clicking the session and there it was again in all it's glory: the German GUI.

When I started using the script this happened to me all the time. Give it some time to settle in, using the script becomes a natural part of working with PT.