Disk Cache is too small? Problems!

[AbjectEvolution]

Ok I have the most recent version of Pro Tools 7.4 (cs2 I think). I recently got Reason 4 and have been routing the two together. I have the music production toolkit as well, so my track count has increased. For the first time, I have gone over the normal ammount of tracks, and almost every track has 2-3 plugins added to it.

Today I was working on a new song, and I duplicated a track. I pressed play, and then recieved this error.

Disk cache is too small. Try increasing the Cache Size or DAE Playback Bugger Size in the Playback Engine dialog. (-9500)

I went to the playback engine thing and increased everything that I could, and when I pressed ok... I got this error

Pro Tools is unable to reacquire the hardware because it is in use by another application. Please quit other applications and hit "OK" to retry. If the hardware cannot be acquired, please quit and relaunch Pro Tools.

So I closed Reason and all the background IM programs and such, and then tried again, but got the same error.

I closed Pro Tools and restarted my computer, but it didn't fix the problem.

So what's wrong?

I have a Intel Core 2 Quad 2.40g
2g of ram
I have 3 harddrives. I have an 80g that is partitioned and then partition without windows is what Pro Tools is installed on. I save all my files and work from my other 300g hard drive.

Please help.

Thanks,
DM

[sinukus]

Hmm, Not sure why duplicating the track would do this, but you can work around it by putting the track(s) into rendered mode. I'm assuming the track is elastic.

[AbjectEvolution]

Yeah I think it is. How do I put it in rendered mode? That will fix the problem?

[AbjectEvolution]

Uh.. .crap. Now when I try to launch Pro Tools, it freezes at "DAE loaded".

[AbjectEvolution]

Ugh... I restarted and now Pro Tools runs again, but I'm getting that same stupid error.

[sinukus]

In the edit window where you select the elastic plug in, select rendered instead of real time.

[AbjectEvolution]

I fixed it. I set the... something... don't remember now... to 2 in the playback engine dialogue. Now it seems fine. Weird. Thanks for the info about elastic time though.

[Petander]

OK I got this same thing happen yesterday. My second "9500" ever.

No playback because of the error.. unless I place the cursor somewhere where there´s no audio at all.

The error came after I selected monophonic EA on a new bass track and let EA analyze it. I did the tweaks and consolidated the track... then "9500" jumped up. I tried cold boot that saved my butt last time I had "9500", not working now.

Even finally deleting the new track didn´t help. The session opens but won´t play... so I tried importing it to a fresh session, same thing. I then copied the lot ( "save copy in..." ) to another drive, same results.

I was thinking of reverting to a saved system image from last week but I wanted to dig in a little deeper on this. My system has been extremely stable,solid and fast for a couple of years by the way.

Then I found out - in horror - that NONE of these yesterday´s sessions worked anymore... I had a buch of different saved versions of the session... they all gave me "9500" , autobackups too. So I didn´t only lose the new bass, I lost it all.

Or so I thought.

I got even more worried and tried some other sessions... a working session from the day before gave me "9500" as well. Got more worried, it looked like PTLE went permanently crazy with me using EA. I don´t use EA that much really. Probably never on a whole four minute track like this.

I finally noticed a mistake, sort of: I had two stereo gtr tracks with EA on ... they were just forgotten settings from another session that I had imported. So when I disabled EA from those tracks my session started to work normally. I opened a bottle of red wine for that relief, ten hours of work, a pretty good tune - and not a single bounce, nothing spared for a possible disaster.

I then tried EA again on a track. It turned out that no matter where I enabled EA, I got the "9500" right away now. So, all those sessions that don´t work now , they have EA enabled somewhere.

I think my next move is the obvious database/ pref trashing. I have NEVER done that to be honest, no problems until now. I have used PTLE for about five years on various computers, pretty much glitch free and pretty much every day. I´ll post the "trashing-results" later, right now my 7.4 cs2 won´t work with any EA at all.

To make this post even longer: It would be nice to have a "master EA-toggle" somewhere in PTLE, wouldn´t it? Maybe it´s just me but I find it quite easy to forget EA on for a track, it´s not very easy to see. Like in this case where I imported a big, pretty template from another session. I had no idea that there already was EA on on a couple of tracks... and it worked for the whole day until I used EA again.

OK, now I´m off for trashing.


EDIT: Oops, I should have posted this in PTLE forum I guess.

[Petander]

Well I was too busy to do any testing today.

Everything worked fine after trashing the databases / prefs -stuff - but I didn´t have any time to try the Elastic thingy. I had to work, it was a 13 hour day and I got a tune finished ok.

But I gotta tell you:

One more "Elastic time" issue and I´m back to 7.1 or 7.3. I do not want Elastic Time as a forced "update" that chokes my system. I record real instruments in real time. No need to tweak, it´s better to play it again if in doubt.

7.1 or 7.3 also run a bit more efficient on my rig, I occasionally revert back to those versions for really big sessions anyway.

Elstic bypass master switch, anyone?

[sinukus]

Hold down the Alt key and select None on any EA track. Thats your master toggle right there.

In the Processing Prefs disable "Enable Elastic on New Tracks" and it wont enable it by default.