"Midi hell" or "where did my keyboard go?"

[John H]

I've had a problem today of my controller keyboard suddenly cutting out mid session as soon as I get a Hardware Buffer error. I've got the HW buffer set to 1024 samples, the cpu usage set to 85% and I'm using sampletank free in a 24 bit session with only 1 midi track and 10 audio tracks playing back while I play a 2nd midi track on the keyboard.

My guess is that protools does something horrible to the system when it throws up one of those "interuption held off... increase the hardware buffer" type errors. As well as the midi keyboard no longer working after the error, I get a very quiet high pitched whine out of the main outputs.

It shows up as MK-249C normally. I used 'auto-detect devices' in OMS after I'd quit protools and instead of showing up the controller keyboard it showed up 2, MK-249C•1 and MK-249C•2. The C•2 version works as an input device with some software synths, the C•1 version doesn't work at all.

I've only got a 300Mhz beige G3 with 320Mb (Rev A desktop model so 384Mb is my limit) and a USB PCI card. I guess USB would have a slight cpu overhead but I tend to run protools into the ground before I'll start submixing to free up cpu time and the error has never caused such problems that I need to restart to get everything back to normal.

I might try leaving "auto suspend" checked to give protools a bit of breathing room but that's not really ideal either.