CPU Overload Mac - Tried everything

[tommytime555]

I'm running 8 audio tracks from my electric drums directly into my Mac Studio (64GB Memory, M1 Max). Changing H/W Buffer Size makes zero difference, about every 20 seconds I get the "A CPU Overload error occurred."

I also tried putting my session on an external SSD, no difference.

I even have Activity Monitor open and I'm not seeing any real CPU spikes. Pro Tools doesn't seem to go over 21%.

The only two possibilities in my mind are:

1. My USB cable going to my drums is too long? (15 feet).
2. I'm using Sonoma 14.5, which isn't the latest OS, but it's also not too old?

Any recommendations really appreciated.

T

[Darryl Ramm]

"Tried everything"? You've mentioned only one thing that is likely really a useful troubleshooting step (trying a larger buffer size... but see note below on recording/playback).

What version of Pro Tools are you running? Kinda important info. I would want to be on 2024.3/2024.3.1 or 2024.6.

When did this start happening?

What changed?

Does this only happen on one session? Or a group of related session? Have you tested starting with a empty session (not from a template).

You would likely make faster progress if you followed the standard troubleshooting approach or something like it. Starting with:

1. Always trash prefs. Use the latest version of Pete Gates PT prefs utility.

2. Uncheck ignore errors. You want any errors to be seen while troubleshooting.

3. *Always suspect plugins*, especially with CPU errors. It can be a plugin installed and not even used, it can be a plugin working fine until something else happens, etc. You *have* to test: try moving all .aaxplugin files out of the plugin folder, trash prefs again and see if the same behavior happens. If it does not then you can suspect one or more plugins and try putting them back in batches trying to find the suspect(s).

There is a whole series of standard troubleshooting steps under "Help Us Help You" up the top of each DUC web page. Those instructions have gotten worse over recent years but combine the points in this post with them. Try all these troubleshooting steps.

Does this problem happen when you are recording/input monitoring or only playing back? Unless you are recording or live monitoring then changing the buffer size is not going to have any effect on Pro Tools since playback only uses the fixed size disk playback buffer which is 1024 or 2048 samples depending on sample rate. If you are recording try setting the buffer size to the largest possible and see what that does, check if the problem happens on playback only. If it does not help and you are seeing the problem with recording then leave the buffer size set to the largest possible value while you try other things.

An external SSD is going to be lower performance than the internal super-fast NVMe SSD. No real reason to try that. And if you are playing back only and using Disk Cache (not set to Normal) then the disk cache will make playback disk I/O performance irrelevant on any disk as long as it's large enough to cache the session and you let it cache fully on startup (but recording might make the disk performance relevant... but again the internal SSD is so fast it's irrelevant).
USB Cables and Sonoma compatibility are not going to be any cause here (unless you are running an old unsupported version of Pro Tools https://avidtech.my.salesforce-sites...m-Requirements).

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by tommytime555

I'm running 8 audio tracks from my electric drums directly into my Mac Studio (64GB Memory, M1 Max). Changing H/W Buffer Size makes zero difference, about every 20 seconds I get the "A CPU Overload error occurred."

I also tried putting my session on an external SSD, no difference.

I even have Activity Monitor open and I'm not seeing any real CPU spikes. Pro Tools doesn't seem to go over 21%.

The only two possibilities in my mind are:

1. My USB cable going to my drums is too long? (15 feet).
2. I'm using Sonoma 14.5, which isn't the latest OS, but it's also not too old?

Any recommendations really appreciated.

T

If you're sending audio from the electronic drums and not MIDI, what is the USB cable being used for?

Are there any plugin in the session of any kind?

I had this occur last month (a basic session which used VERY little CPU but through out overload errors anyway) and it turned out to be Pianoverse, which sucks in ProTools. The CPU meter was consistent but I'd see the meters go red occasionally, and that happened so fast that the meters didn't show anything, and that's when the error would occur. Plugin incompatibility is the #1 cause of this in my experience, but bad cables or audio interfaces "sleeping" and needing to be restarted can also do the trick. Or a computer restart.

In the old days, zapping the nvram would often fix it, but that's no longer an option with M1 Macs.