White noise blast from MBox2

[MGH]

Hi! I'm the Coordinator of Music Technology at a major College in Western Canada, and in addition to a HD system in our Recording studio, we've got Mbox 2's on several Mac Pro's AND we've started a laptop program with 15 MacBook Pro's and MB2's for our recording Majors (all running 10.5.4 BTW, NOT 10.5.5 until Digi says OK).

The problem has really been plaguing me in our Music Technology Lab that I teach in, and when you launch ANY audio app, from Garageband to Logic to PT LE 7.4.2, the MBox2 is sending out full-scale white noise upon record. The ONLY way I've been able to fix this is to quite the app, unplug the USB cable from the interface, plug back in and restart the app. Then everything works great. It's been happening about 80% of the time now, but has only happened sporadically on a few of the student's machines. I've tried two other boxes with no improvement. So it seems to me like it's software based, but so far I've been unable to find the source.

Any suggestions?

Marcel

[MGH]

NOBODY is having this problem?? Any thoughts would be appreciated!!

Marcel

[Jussi]

Do not use sleep mode. (If you or your students sometimes do, restart the computer before using any DAW.)

I think it was this that cured my white noise blasts. Haven't had any for a year.

[DigiTechSupt]

What types of drives are you using for recording and playback and were they formatted using the OS X Disk Utility?

Make sure you have Airport/Bluetooth/Wireless disabled as they can cause noise blasts like this.

As Jussi said - do not enable any kind of sleep mode.

[MGH]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Sure enough I do have Sleep mode on (there are often lulls when no one is using the room), so I've turned that off now and I'll keep an eye (and ear!!) on it. I've only got Ethernet enabled in the Network settings as well. But I'm pretty sure that I've had the noise bursts when the machine is first turned on, but not 100% positive.

I'll let you know.

Thanks again,

Marcel