[the_dr38]

As comprehensive and industry standard as Pro Tools is - there has always been a little glitch somewhere which makes it frustrating to use, and in my case - you are always a little nervous that you won't be able to show the director your work due to some potential issue which 'doesn't usually happen'. You just need to find a work around. I remember the days when you'd have one stereo track of music to play and you would press play and get a CPU overload and it would crash - resulting in an angry director and 100 crew looking at you as you went bright red - very frustrating. Often it meant looking into chipsets of hard drives - and virus software compatibility. This resulted in needing a dedicated laptop with no internet capability (as you couldn't risk the system updating itself or doing anything int he background), just for Pro tools - because I had managed to get it working well and couldn't risk even the installation of a simple bit of software like Microsoft Office as it may result in Pro Tools not wanting to open - it has come a long way since then in terms of installation and power handling (largely due to the later laptops becoming so powerful) - although the licensing process is a little bit of a drag

Regarding the issue in the current thread - if I don't want to plug in a piece of hardware I just deselect external headphones from the playback engine and choose any other option like PT aggregate and then you can plug in and out during playback no problem.