Oh mighty AVID, WHY?

[alfaholic]

Snow Leopard 10.6.x - Pro Tools 8.0.4 - Digi 002r - CPU is going crazy, 6086 errors all the time, and most important, when I want to load a plugin whyle PT is runing, everything freezes for more than 40 seconds!

Leopard 10.5.x - Pro Tools 8.x.x - Digi 002r - Everything works as it should, JUST 9019-9031 errors, then I need to restart Pro Tools.

Tried EVERYTHING, always the same. With screensaver, or without, recording on the main drive-partition, or not, delete prefs, or not, my system is working the same.

Please, where is the problem?

[nst7]

Are you recording to a separate audio drive? If not, that could be the problem. Partitioning doesn't really work in this situation.

[n8tron]

I've been having this same problem, both with PT8 and now PT9. Actually, 9 has helped the plugin issue you are describing. But I'm still getting -6086 errors.

I'm recording on a separate internal SATA drive on my mac pro. I thought it was my 002R, but it works fine in other DAWs. Have another thread describing that...

[DigiTechSupt]

Love to try to help, but I'm going to need a lot more info - see the Help Us Help You thread for details about what we need to know.

[n8tron]

my info:

-2x2.66 dual core Mac Pro
-7 GB ramm
-10.6.6
-Digi 002R with Pro Tools 9.0.1
-USB - 2 usb hubs with trackball, keyboard, printer, ilok, vienna key attached, also attached to usb ports are an axiom pro 49 and a line 6 x3 live.
-Nothing but the 002R is attached to any firewire ports. 400 to rear 400 port.
-I have all 4 SATA bays loaded with hard drives. I use one for system, one for recording, one for samples, and one for backup. All are formatted Mac 0S Extended (Journaled). My record drive is a 1.5 tb Seagate, system is a 320gb Seagate, sample drive is a 320gb Seagate.

Plugins:
Kontakt 4.13
Sonalksis essentials 2.0.8
TL Space 8.0
Massey Tapehead and CT4 latests versions
Pod Farm 1.12
Various AIR plugins/instruments, DB33, Mini Grand, etc.

Generally, the pro tools system usage has my cpu at 25-30% standing, and 30-40% playback.


Problem
95% of the time, after a session is opened, I will press play and immediately a spinning wheel will occur for 10-30seconds. then i will receive a "The operating system held of interrupts for too long... (-6086) or (-6093) or a cpu error (-9128)

Afterwords the session may playback fine for a few mins. Then after a few more start and stops the error will occur again (always immediately after playback or recording).

Solutions tried:
I checked all my plugins, non seem to be effecting the problem. (I will un-instantiate the plugins and playback one plugin type at a time). The less plugins I do have the less frequent the error occurs, but it still occurs. I've tried various hardware buffer settings. 256 or 512 seem to work best. I've tried all the different CPU% usage settings, 80-85% seem to work best.

I've trashed prefs, I've switched firewire cables and firewire ports (all of them on my mac pro and 2 on my 002R). I've repaired permissions on my system drive and repaired my other 3 drives. I've set up my OS exactly the computer optimizations guide you have. Airport bluetooth, filevault, time machine etc. all off. Hard disks don't spin down, computer and monitor sleep set to never. etc. etc.

One thing to note is I often use my 002R with digi core audio manager and Ableton Live. This works fine, almost zero problems. I'd say really zero problems recently actually. Another thing to note is I've tried Pro Tools 9 with my MOTU 828 (original) and it works more or less fine, with the occasional "you are running out of CPU" error.

[DigiTechSupt]

What is the partition map scheme on all of your drives? Did you erase the drives using the Disk Utility before using them?

I wonder if you may have a bad cable or drive connection - you may want to try reseating all drives and/or removing 1 or more of them and test a drive in each slot to see if anything changes.

Also, what configuration is your RAM in (what size sticks in which slots)?

[Park Seward]

Originally Posted by n8tron

Solutions tried:
I checked all my plugins, non seem to be effecting the problem. (I will un-instantiate the plugins and playback one plugin type at a time).

What do you mean by "checked all my plugins"? Did you look at the plug-in compatibility grid? Did you remove the plugs (not just not putting them in a session since PT loads all your plugs when booting. You have to REMOVE them).

Put them all into the "unused plug-ins folder" and restart and re-boot. Then add one back at a time.

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

Look going to say it as simple as can be. Help US, help YOU. By providing US with a sandra report of your computer. Sentences like you just wrote will certainly not bring people to help you what so ever. So if you really want help, then do the proper steps. Post a sandra report.

Simple?

Kinda hard (and pointless) to do a Sandra report on a Mac.

Really, all this comes down to is what sounds like an incompatible plugin. If changing the OS makes the difference, then it is definitely a software issue that doesn't sound like it's directly related to Pro Tools.

You said you tried instantiating and uninstantiating plugins... But a plugin doesn't have to be in a session to cause a problem. The software could also be something that runs via rewire, which may not even be a plugin specifically.

The only proper way to determine that a plugin is causing problems is to completely empty your plugins folder except for stock digi plugins installed with Pro Tools. If you can run Pro Tools without errors like this, there is a plugin problem.

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by Dism

Kinda hard (and pointless) to do a Sandra report on a Mac.

Sandra might not be willing to dance with a mac, but i'm pretty sure I saw an equivalent program that works with macs. Trying to find it again.

//right didn't have to go far. There is already an application that is bundled with macs called system profiler which is supposed to do the exact same thing as sandra.

[DigiTechSupt]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

Sandra might not be willing to dance with a mac, but i'm pretty sure I saw an equivalent program that works with macs. Trying to find it again.

//right didn't have to go far. There is already an application that is bundled with macs called system profiler which is supposed to do the exact same thing as sandra.

There is - it's the 'system profile' - go to the Mac icon in the upper left, select 'About this Mac', then click on 'More Info'. You can then save that as an xml file and send it to us along with anything else we request.