New ProTools User - Mbox Woes, Performance Issues?

[damonmenne]

Hey fellow Digi users. ;-]

I'm a new ProTools user, and am loving it so far. I'm much happier here than I was using my last DAW.

I bought an Mbox to get started with ProTools and am hoping to move to a 002 once it's working in Mac OS X, but first there's a weird issue with my Mbox I can't seem to solve.

It may not be an issue at all, could be just normal behavior.

Configuration: Titanium PowerBook G4 1ghz / 1GB / 40GB with Mbox as only periphreal, running Mac OS X 10.2.5

When I load the demo session from the ProTools LE 6.0 CD, my PowerBook's CPU load sits at 80% or so. After it's loaded, while doing nothing. It just sits idle at 80% CPU. If I hit the checkbox "active while in background" so that it's set to no, the 80% cpu drops to 8-9% when ProTools LE 6 is in the background.

If I create a session and load several clips into several tracks, the load slowly increases and sits steady at a pretty high level... 20%...30%...40% as I add more and more tracks.

The task window within ProTools LE 6 does not show any background tasks going on.

Is this normal behavior? To hog tons of CPU when I'm just sitting there? Is it because ProTools LE 6 for OS X is pretty weird and incomplete? Will v5 on OS 9 not do this? It's irritating because the machine gets laggy and weird, and it just bothers me at a level since Logic 6 never did this to me. [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

Any feedback, ideas, thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[ghostman420]

It's very normal. Especially if your running sessions with high track counts and lots of plugins. The CPU meter will be high even if you haven't pressed play yet.