Protools stops working overnight?
 

I'm running Pro-tools M-Powerered 7.1 on OS X 10.4.1 with 1 GB RAM. I've had this same setup for over a year, and I've never had any serious problems with it.

I was recording a band one day and I had no problems carrying out relatively computer intensive tasks in pro tools (recording 8 or so tracks at a time with a buffer size of 256 and the DAE playback on level 8.) We finished the recording session without any problems.

The next day, I had another band come to record. Nothing had changed since the previous day and i even had more memory on my hard drive, but I had a lot of problems recording. i started out recording 8 tracks at a 256 buffer size. After about twenty seconds of recording, it would stop and i would get a DAE playback error. I tried increasing the buffer size to 512 then 1024 and eventually just recording 3 tracks at a time. I still would only get about twenty seconds of audio recorded before i got the playback error.

Also, even when mixing previously recorded sessions, pro tools begins to run very slowly after adding some plug-ins and it makes it near impossible to bounce. i haven't changed anything in the way i mix

Nothing i tried has worked yet and i'm confused as to what would cause such a drastic change in such a short period of time.

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

any recent updates at all? what kind of harddrive are you recording to?

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

oh right i forgot to mention that I'm recording onto my mac's internal hard drive. i know it's not the best way to do it but ive never had any problems before and i don't have any available firewire ports for an external drive.

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

There is your issue. Pro Tools requires that you run on an external FireWire harddrive that is running at 7200 RPM. Recording to your computer's internal drive can take a real toll on the drive and shorten it's life considerably. To me it sounds like your drive is getting tired and is now being a grumpy old man because of it. If I were you I would go out tomorrow and buy a 7200 RPM Hard Drive. Right now I am running an AcomData and it works fantastic. Best of luck to you.


Michael Winters

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

but i never had a problem, BEFORE? Do people even bother to read other posts, or do they just post questions?

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

Thanks for the help, I'll take your advice.

Are the 8MB drives enough to run with pro tools without problems, or should I get one with 16MB? I don't know too much about external drives.

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

Everything you need to know is already on the digidesign site check here.. http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...fpart=1#888122

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

I don't think this is a PT issue. This is an Apple issue. We went through the same thing a while back at the 10.4.9 update.

Yesterday morning, everything was fine. Yesterday afternoon, my mail program had been updated. Not only did it wipe out my pop acct completely, including my saved messages, but PT wouldn't open at all, similar to the 10.4.9 update.

I am researching this issue tonight and if I find a fix, I will post it.

And by the way, I have been recording to the intenal drive in my PC laptop forever and have had not a single issue, ever. But if this is what you do save yourself some trouble in case things go sideways, back your sessions to something. I hate spending 50-60 hours on a project and its gone just that fast.

Re: Protools stops working overnight?
 

Got it to work.

Go here.......http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?...4&itemid=22904

Scroll down the page until you see a link that has to do with repair prebinding utility.

Download it, when it opens, click the icon and let it go. It could take awhile. When done, quit, then try PT, mine opened normally.

This has got to be the same issue, yours and mine.

Post back with the result please.

Cheers and back to work,

Bob