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Old 09-28-2005, 03:42 PM
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Default Pro Tools M-Powered Setup and General Troubleshooting

Please review this guide and the appropriate sections for possible solutions to the problems you're experiencing.

For problems regarding registration and installation:

Pro Tools Technical Support, Registration and Setup Videos

These videos have information on the following topics:

Product Registration
Technical Support - Searching Answerbase and getting answers to your questions
Pro Tools System Compatibility - How to determine if your system is compatible
Mbox 2 family - Information on what's in the box
Authorizing Ignition Pack 2

If you are getting an error in Pro Tools, the first step would be to search both the DUC and the Answerbase for the error number(s) you're getting, as a vast majority of errors have solutions already. Make sure to remove the minus sign (-) from in front of the error number during you're search, as a minus sign in a search field means you want to exclude the following term from the search.

If you are experiencing a particular technical issue that does not include an error number, try searching the Answerbase and DUC by key words that are related to your problem. Try a few different, related terms to see if they produce better search results. Use the Advanced Search on the DUC to narrow or expand your search results. For general 'assertion', 'neoaccess' or 'neoassertion' errors, see below for a possible solution, then do a search for the last few sections of the error if the presented solution does not help.


Other things to check:

1. Reseat cards and cables and/or replace cables. Even new cables are prone to failure and cable failure is one of the major causes for issues.
2. For recording or playback issues, test from a different drive to eliminate the drive as a source for the problem.
3. Remove components of the system to determine if they may be related to the problems - devices such as MIDI controllers, USB drives, etc.
4. If possible, for general hardware issues, try testing the questionable hardware on another computer, to see if it follows the hardware or is specific to your system.
5. Uninstall and reinstall your M-Audio hardware drivers, making sure you're on the latest driver available for your hardware and platform.

By process of elimination, you can narrow down the ultimate cause of your issues and determine the best course of action.


Compatibility

Verify you are using a supported Mac and your system meets all of the minimum requirements. You can find compatibility information in the Support section of the website:
www.digidesign.com/support

Choose from the product list for compatibility information, and click on the links in the compatibility section for each product for additional information.

- Verify that you have the Minimum or Suggested amount of Ram loaded in your system:
For current Pro Tools systems, that is the following:
1 GB (1024 MB) or more highly recommended. The best user experience has been reported using 2 GB or more, especially when using software instruments.
- Verify that your version of the Mac OS is supported with your version of Pro Tools:
Pro Tools LE Version Compatibility Grid for Mac OS X
More Information:
Mac OS X 10.4 Requirements with Pro Tools 6 & 7
Mac OS X 10.2 & 10.3 Requirements with Pro Tools 6

- Make sure all drives are formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with OS X’s Disk Utility. Pro Tools can not use UFS or HFS volumes. If the drive was originally formatted in OS 9 or with any other application, backup the drive and reinitialize it with Disk Utility. More information:
Hard Drive Requirements - Pro Tools LE for Mac OS X
- If you are on a PowerPC (PPC) Mac, you cannot record to a GUID partitioned drive (which is typically the partition type for Intel based Mac boot/OS drives). You must reformat the drive as Apple Partition Map. While APM formatted drives can be used for recording with both PPC and Intel based Macs, if you are experiencing errors, clicks/pops or other anomalies with an APM partitioned drive on an Intel Mac, it's strongly suggested you back up that drive and reformat it with a GUID partition, as doing so will likely solve the problem.

IMPORTANT! You MUST use a secondary hard drive (not your main OS drive) for recording and playback of audio in Pro Tools. Recording or playback from the OS drive is known to be problematic and the cause of many different error types. If you are using your system drive and encountering errors, the first thing you should do is get a compatible drive.

Pro Tools supports recording and playback to a secondary drive that meets the following requirements:

7200 rpm or faster
9ms seek time or faster

Firewire drives must have the Oxford 911 (FW400 port), Oxford 912 (FW400 & FW800 ports) or Oxford 924 (FW800 ports) Bridge chip. Other Oxford chipsets, while not fully tested, have not shown any issues and should generally work well with Pro Tools.

USB drives are not supported and are known to be problematic. Avoid using USB drives, as they are known for causing a variety of errors.

Mbox 2 Pro and M-Audio firewire device specific issues

You should NOT use the AC adapter for the Mbox 2 Pro unless the firewire port on your computer doesn't supply power - for instance, if it's a 'mini' firewire port with only 4 pins. Doing so can cause 6085 errors.

Mbox 2 Pro and most M-Audio firewire interfaces do not support FW800 connections anywhere in the chain. If you only have a firewire 800 port on your computer, you can try using a FW800 to FW400 adapter cable however keep in mind that this is not the ideal solution and may still be problematic. A better solution is to get a FW400 expresscard (for laptops) or PCI/PCIe FW400 card (for desktops) and connect your interface to that. The Siig 2 Port card (link to expresscard or PCIe versions) has been shown to be suitable for this situation.

If your computer has both FW400 and FW800 ports on it, they're most likely using the same bus and the above info would still apply, though you have the flexibility of connecting any firewire drives you're using either to the FW400 or FW800 ports on the computer or to the card, as long as your interface is not on the same bus - so if you connect your drives to the computer ports, connect your interface to the card or vice versa.

Plug-In Compatibility

Make sure that all Plug-Ins are compatible with the version of Pro Tools you're running. It is extremely important that you have installed only compatible plug-ins. See reply post below for more info!

-Open MacHD>Library>Application Support>Digidesign>Plug-Ins

You can check the version by selecting the plug-in and go to the "File" menu and choose 'Get Info', or hit Command-I and look at the version information under the 'General' Section.

Compare the version installed against the compatibility grid here and update or uninstall as necessary:

Pro Tools Plug-In Compatibility

6086, 9128 or other errors when using certain plug-ins, VI's, software synths or samplers

Reducing the number of CPU's in the Playback Engine may be required for certain plug-ins to function properly with Pro Tools.

General Setup and System Optimizations

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Optimizations and Troubleshooting
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Optimizations and Troubleshooting
Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 Optimizations and Troubleshooting

We also have YouTube and Vimeo videos on the above topics:

Pro Tools Optimization Videos on YouTube

Pro Tools Optimization Videos on Vimeo


Further troubleshooting tips

Please download and install the Pro Tools Tech Support Folder , which has tools and utilities to assist in diagnosing and troubleshooting potential problems you may encounter, including a plug-in version generator that can be useful when verifying plug-in compatibility.

Errors when using certain plug-ins, VI's, software synths or samplers

Try reducing the number of CPU's in the Playback Engine and see if it helps.

Test RAM

A somewhat frequent cause of general computer problems has been traced to bad RAM. Unfortunately there's no reliable software test of RAM. The only way to be absolutely sure is to remove and/or swap RAM modules, hopefully with known good ones.


Other Troubleshooting

- Remove any unnecessary USB or Firewire devices or any other extraneous hardware and then restart the computer.

- Test your interface connected to a different port on the computer, as you may have a malfunctioning port. On some systems, on port may work better than the other.

- In the case of possible hardware issues with your Mac the next step is to test the Mac hardware. To do this, boot off of the Apple Hardware Test CD or Software Restore DVD (depending on Mac model) that shipped with your Mac. If you are booting off of the Software Restore DVD, hold the option key while the Mac starts up, then choose Apple Hardware Test. Once Apple Hardware Test loads, press Control+L. This puts Apple Hardware Test in loop mode. Click Extended Test, and let it go (preferably overnight). When you return, the hardware test will have found an error or it will be continuing. If it finds an error, it will give you an error code and you will be able to see which iteration of the loop it found the error on. If it has not found an error, it will still be looping and it will indicate which iteration of the loop is currently in progress. Either way, the only way to restart your Mac is to hold in the power key to shut it down first.



How to Remove Expired (Demo) Plug-Ins & Software:

- See Answerbase 19348

Uninstall and reinstall Pro Tools
-Run the Pro Tools installer from your CD-ROM or web download.
-Click on the Custom Install menu and choose "Uninstall".
-Click continue and then choose the option for "Clean" uninstall
-Click OK when it reports that the uninstall was successful and then reinstall Pro Tools.


If you continue to have problems after going through all of the above

Help us help you!

To enable Digidesign Technical Support and other users to assist you with your problem, PLEASE provide a complete system profile as well as a complete description of the problem you're experiencing, including the exact text and error numbers in any error messages you're gettting. PLEASE list exactly which of the above steps you've done - you can use the title of each section to indicate if you've done the step or not.

At the very least, we need the following information:
  • Computer model and processor speed
  • OS version
  • Pro Tools version
  • Amount of RAM installed
  • Any attached peripherals (hard drives, video devices, other firewire or USB devices that may be attached, etc)
  • Number and type (firewire, SATA, SCSI, etc) of drives installed
  • Which of the drive(s) are being used for recording and playback
  • A concise list of the troubleshooting you've already tried - please be as specific as possible! The first thing we'll ask is 'Have you done everything in the Setup and General Troubleshooting thread?', so we'll want to know that you've done ALL of it and, if you've not done everything, we need to know what you have or have not done, as this can have a huge impact on further troubleshooting.

The more information you can provide, the easier it will be for Tech Support and other users to assist you - take the time now to document everything you can and you'll save time in the long run.



=====

Note: To enable other users to help you, please include all of your system details when posting an issue to the DUC; Pro Tools hardware, Pro Tools software version, computer model/processor speed, OS version, amount of RAM installed, type of hard drives used, etc.
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  #2  
Old 10-26-2009, 10:59 AM
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Default Re: Pro Tools MP Setup and General Troubleshooting

Plug-In Compatibility - It's Important!

Many issues are caused by incompatible plug-ins being installed. They don't even have to be used in the session to cause problems - just having them in the plug-ins folder can cause bizarre problems. The reason is that, upon launch, Pro Tools caches all the installed plug-in data - that cache interacts with many aspects of Pro Tools, from thread scheduling to automation, etc.

I strongly recommend taking 30 minutes to carefully go through your plug-in list and compare it to our Pro Tools Plug-in Compatibility Grid. Remove or update any plug-ins that are not the minimum version listed. If you don't see your plug-in on the list, remove it temporarily for testing purposes then, once your system is stable, verify with the manufacturer regarding it's compatibility. If they indicate it's compatible, put it back into your plug-ins folder and test again. Do this ony by one for any plug-ins in question, so you can narrow down which ones my be problematic.

FWIW I have never, ever seen a case where someone said 'all my plug-ins are compatible' and actually have that be the case so, please, double and triple check. You can't be too careful in regards to this! A majority of instability reported on the DUC has been traced to plug-ins.

After removing/updating any plug-ins always trash preferences, then restart, so that all plug-in data can be reloaded and re-cached.

If you are still experiencing problems, please use the Tech Support Utility to generate and post a plug-in version list so we can double check. Given that our time here is limited, we expect you to carefully verify your plug-ins first.

Also, due to some plug-ins using code that cannot run on a processor dedicated to RTAS, you may need to reduce the number of processors in the playback engine to avoid errors. The processors are still being used - they just run the code that can't run on a dedicated RTAS processor. Some code will interrupt real-time processes if they're run on the same core.
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  #3  
Old 12-22-2009, 08:55 AM
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Default Re: Pro Tools MP Setup and General Troubleshooting

If you are experiencing problems with MIDI in Pro Tools (or any other application) where you cannot get input or output, OR your MIDI interface is greyed out in Audio MIDI Setup, try this:

Go to MacHD>Users>your account>Library>Preferences>By Host and trash 'com.apple.midi.a bunch of numbers and letters.plist'.

Go to MacHD>Users>your account>Library>Preferences and trash 'com.apple.audio.audiomidisetup.plist'.

Empty the trash and restart, then see if everything is working.
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Old 01-06-2010, 03:33 PM
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Default Re: Pro Tools MP Setup and General Troubleshooting

Core Audio troubleshooting - for general Core Audio problems, such as if your interface is not being recognized or it's greyed out in Audio MIDI Setup (AMS), try this:

Quit out of all open applications.

Trash the following preference files:

1. Mac HD > Users > (Your User Name) > Library > Preferences > com.apple.systempreferences.plist (delete this file)
2. Mac HD > Users > (Your User Name) > Library > Preferences > com.apple.audio.AudioMIDISetup.plist (delete this file)
3. Mac HD > Users > (Your User Name) > Library > Preferences > com.digidesign.CoreAudioManager.plist (delete this file)
4. Mac HD > Users > (Your User Name) > Library > Preferences > ByHost > com.apple.systempreferences.xxxxxxxxxxxx.plist (delete this file)

Empty the trash, restart and test again.
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  #5  
Old 05-11-2010, 02:31 PM
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Default Re: Pro Tools MP Setup and General Troubleshooting

If you're experiencing problems with MP3 export, please see this page:

http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/self...p?DocId=357165
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