Thick lines in Track (Edit Window)

[danielmak]

Hi. I am new to the forum and have searched but perhaps missed a solution to the problem I am having. I teach an audio documentary class in a Mac lab. I had been using 5 MBOX2 and 1 MBox1 and have had no problems with these boxes (all the problems usually resulted from students connecting input cables to the output, etc.). I recently purchased 3 MBox2 minis and am having problems with 2 of them.

We are running 10.4.10 on G5 towers and importing documentary materials via minidisc, so I have 1/8" cables running form the MD to the MBox with 1/4" stereo attachments. My Mbox2 minis have 7.3.1 LE software. As soon as we hit record in Pro Tools, we get solid (non-moving) levels in the skinny meters on the left side of the Edit Window. When we hit play in the transport window to start the recording process and import the sounds, we get solid, thick, rectangular black lines instead of waves. We can hear very very faint sounds from the mini disc but are clearly not getting the full sound. The configuration on these two boxes is exactly the same as the one that works (d1 instead of mic, pad set the same way, etc.) so I am assuming that there is something in the software that I am missing. The one quirk that I have run into in the past is that the input setting switches from analogue to digital, but that just results in no sound coming in and nothing in the track beyond a thin straight line when in record mode. This is clearly something different.

Any advice on how to solve this problem? Take care.