Heavy CPU load with occasional error 6101
 

I'm running Pro Tools LE 8.0.1 with an Mbox 2 USB interface on a 2.1 Ghz Power PC G5 iMac with 2.5G of ram. I'm recording to a 7200 rpm external hard drive via Firewire 400 (the best the iMac G5 offers).

I've been trying to get this setup as stable as possible. I've recorded a few demos already and I occasionally get a 6101 (H/W buffer) error. I've already read through the General Troubleshooting page and done what seemed appropriate to my computer with regards to the system preferences and such.

I spent some time and went through my plug-ins (most of which came with the software or from Avid) and made sure there weren't any incompatibles or ones not up to date.

I just went back today to a previous session and recorded nothing to an extra midi track and did this with the Mac's Activity Monitor running to see how the CPU was doing. Pro Tools seems to eating A LOT of CPU... like in the upper 70-80%. Nothing else is running. I just want any help anyone can offer on how to get this down so Pro Tools is stable and I'm not hitting any 6101 errors while trying to track something.

I'm not running huge sessions either. I'm talking less than 10 tracks with just a few plug-ins going... I don't have the plug-ins active when I'm recording either.

Please help...

Re: Heavy CPU load with occasional error 6101
 

What's your Playback Engine set to? If you've got two processors, set it to 1 @ 99% CPU usage limit.

Any other info you can give us?

Re: Heavy CPU load with occasional error 6101
 

Well, I've had it set to 512 samples, but I've only got 1 processor and it will only let me go up to 85%.

Re: Heavy CPU load with occasional error 6101
 

Plus I've reduced the number of undo's to 16 from 32 after I watched on a tutorial that it would help on processing/memory power or something.

I know the easy answer to this for a lot of you may be, "get a new computer with more processing power"... but if it's at all possible to make it more "stable" so I can make it work well now, while saving up for a new computer in the future, that'd be the best... so yeah...