Mbox Pro unable to mix and record in Pro Tools LE

[Tenderpile]

im going through the Avid Intro to Pro Tools PDF which has been very helpful except that the examples they use are for Pro Tools 8.0.4 and im using 8.0.1 so certain things aren't quite the same. what im trying to do is make a simple recording and when i go to mix in the mix window i can't get the levels to show at all. I've tried adjusting the gain, different mics, and selecting different inputs but i cant get anything.

[Craig F]

Well what do you have?

[Tenderpile]

iMac
Mbox Pro

[Craig F]

OSX version
Pro Tools version
what external drive your recording to

all the stuff in this thread:
Help Us Help You

[jbasil]

Tenderpile, here goes me as a broken record again : ) but the communication between the mBox Pro software and PTools is flakey and needs to be fixed. The lack of audio passing through could also be due to a combination of buttons engaged the way they would seem to be intuitively supposed to, but their combinations are troublesome. Sometimes, though, all the ducks are in a row and there is no audio. There is a secret solution that apparently requires using up your one tech support call. I say secret because (and I would be sincerely happy to be shown otherwise and I'll retract the statement) it is not shared anywhere on AVID's site. It has certainly not been pointed to by Tech Support when the question is repeatedly asked. However, the kind DUC member "enough" used up his single call in pursuit of this after months of chasing the moon and the sun being led down dead ends of standard but red herring troubleshooting, and should be credited with sharing it in this thread:

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=294454


Follow it exactly and you should get your audio back for the rest of the boot. Believe me, any other avenue (drives, connections, buffer, versions) will just send you down into the black hole of non solution. All hail enough. Why AVID didn't make it a sticky here as soon as they discovered it as a kludge to jar the Control Panel back awake is beyond me.

[Tenderpile]

OS X 10.5.8
Pro Tools 8.0.1
i am not recording to an external. im recording to the internal hard drive.

[Tenderpile]

jbasil, the issue that the fellow on the other thread is having dosnt sound like the same issue i am having. i have sound through my Mbox and monitors, i just cant record anything. the thing(not sure exactly what it is called) that shows you if your recording is peaking or not shows nothing.

[jbasil]

Are you saying that files already in the session play fine but you can't get signal into the session, or that you can hear what you are trying to record through mbox and monitors but this signal doesn't get recorded? Also, has it suddenly jumped to this problem (and it was fine ten minutes ago) or is this what you've been experiencing throughout?

Taking this at its simplest version, it seems like the routing from your input on the box is off somewhere between it and PTools (unless you hear it but it doesn't record). Check that the track is set to receive input from the right source. 1 or 2, etc. Also that the box is properly set at line or mic. All that stuff. : )

Or have you already triple checked that and there's still no input? Do the mbox meters register but not the PTools meter on the track?

[Bob L]

Originally Posted by Tenderpile

i am not recording to an external. im recording to the internal hard drive.

You know this is going to be a problem eventually, right?

[jbasil]

Originally Posted by Bob L

You know this is going to be a problem eventually, right?

But aside from being irrelevant to the issue at hand, recording to the best drive will only give you best (theoretical) results. It won't make a rig that wasn't working suddenly work, so regardless of it being yet another duck to have in a row, in reality it's the last thing one needs to worry about if the rig's not working. And in fact I do it fairly often on a MBP within reason when I'm being lazy or ornery and I advise everyone to do the same every once in a while just to wave the internal drive voodoo dispeller on their rig. ; ).