this is messed up

[groovilator]

I was laying down some vox the other night on this techno thing. Part of it involved trying to replicate the "BT stutter", for which I was making several tiny little cuts in a region which took forever. I tried to save time by going to "mute" view and inserting breakpoints and then copying and pasting across the region. Not only did it not achieve the desired effect, but for some reason, after copying and pasting a few dozen breakpoints over a couple seconds of region, when I hit play, Pro Tools would automatically quit. This happened a few times and then I started getting some kind of error that prevented me from doing anything more in that session. So I created a new session and imported the tracks from the original session and continued recording with no problems. Then at some point, out of the blue, whenever I hit play I got a message saying Assertion in "Mdie_TrackPlayer.ccp", line 518. I was tired by that time and called it a night thinking I was just going to have to rebuild the session later. But now I find that the problem isn't just with that session, because I'm getting the same message no matter what session I try to play. Anybody else seen this error? I couldn't find anything on it when I searched the answerbase and the rest of the site with that phrase. This is messed up. I don't have time for this. Help is very much appreciated.

My specs:
Mbox 2 w/ LE 7.0 on a
Mac Mini PowerPC G4
OS X Tiger
1.25 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM

[jre3132]

kind of sounds like a corrupt audio file.

[groovilator]

You're right. It does sound like a corrupted file of some sort. But like I said, every session I open and try to play gives me the same error. My system runs really smoothly most of the time, this is my first major problem. The only other occasional problem I have is my CPU getting backed up because I really need more RAM, but that's no big deal.
The obvious question at the top of my mind is, do I need to reinstall? Or even upgrade? I just wanted to see if anyone else had seen this and can advise me before I do anything.

[M.Brane]

Wasn't 7.0 a buggy version? I remember a lot of problems with the initial release.

Maybe you should clone your present 7.0 system to a backup, and give 7.1 a try. It's a free upgrade from 7.0.

Have you cleaned up your disks lately? If you're light on RAM it puts a lot of stress on your boot drive with swap file/VM activity when you run it hard. Not good on a Mini which has a slow internal drive.

[groovilator]

Aha. I've never done any disk cleaning as I am not primarily a Mac user. I know plenty about PC maintenance but I bought this minimac awhile back and really have only put it to limited use so far. In fact, I'm not sure disk cleaning would be terribly necessary at this point since it's a dedicated system that I haven't really done much with but, since ya bring it up, can you get me started on that process?
And perhaps you could clue me in on the cloning. I think I will try 7.1.
Thanks for you guys' help so far.

[M.Brane]

Probably the best Mac drive cloning/backup utility:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/

Also useful if you don't have access to a backup boot drive:

http://applejack.sourceforge.net/#top

You need to be booted from another drive to repair your internal drive with Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities), but you can repair permissions on the boot drive which is a start.

Also check the general troubleshooting thread at the top of the forum for Pro Tools specific suggestions.

[groovilator]

still wondering if anyone else out there has experience with this error
thanks