pro tools hang and start up trouble

[[email protected]]

thanks. now I´ve deleted prefs as you said, but now PT hangs on «initializing library content», doesn’t matter what kind of sessions I try to open, on the ssd or on the desktop. going crazy here. restarted twice: nothing.

[Darryl Ramm]

You mean this SSD? https://www.seagate.com/products/cre...e-portable-ssd Make sure is is formatted as an APFS drive (Not NTFS, not exFAT, not HFS+...)

That should work fine as a session/audio drive. But again there is no need to do this, I would usually start with using the boot/audio drive for sessions. If you are running out of space you might want to move samples libraries to that external drive (may free up more space than moving sessions). Some reasons for putting sessions on an external drive include moving them between systems (but work out how to do that without risking moving your only copy) or working with different backup strategies (although if backup plans work best with a separate drive volume you can create volumes on the boot/system drive... APFS is very flexible there).

That's a USB 3.2 Gen 2 aka 10Gbit/sec SSD. But jeez Seagate make finding simple specs hard. It should be a fine drive for audio/session work.

FWIW the canonical drive in this space is probably the Samsung T7, what I usually recommend as an external drive, especially a backup SSD unless you want higher performance Thunderbolt drives. The T7 is nice in that it implements NVMe over USB, for a little more efficiency. I suspect the Seagate/Lacie one does not given how they talk about it, but again oh lack of useful specs. But it should be a fine drive, and if you don't need it as a session or samples drive use it as a backup drive.

If you are running out of space make sure there is just not a pile of stuff you don't need and can delete off the internal drive, old videos, unseeded apps, etc. Systems Setting>Storage is a place to start to see what is taking up space. As is using Spotlight to say search for all files over 1GB. (sigh, I just found 53GB of local iPhone backups I never wanted to make in the first place)

With any third party SSD vendor make sure you know how to check the drive firmware and update it if needed, these drives are complex small computers themselves and can have serious firmware issues. Not having to worry about that is one of the reasons that it might be worth paying the annoying Apple tax on their expensive internal SSDs when buying a new Mac.

[[email protected]]

sorry to bother you again, believe me! Now I´ve done the plug in thing; removed them from the folder (made a folder on the desktop) and now it launched but all my plug ins are gone, apart from the few stock ones. do I move them back?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by [email protected]

sorry to bother you again, believe me! Now I´ve done the plug in thing; removed them from the folder (made a folder on the desktop) and now it launched but all my plug ins are gone, apart from the few stock ones. do I move them back?

Yes you just move them back. Did you do enough startup tests to show if the plugins are suspects or not? Just starting up Pro Tools, opening sessions and closing them, etc?

There is an Plug-Ins (Unused) folder next to the Plug-Ins folder that was historically a place for moving the plugins to, but you can use any place you want. If you do use Plug-Ins (Unused) in future check that it does not have old junk in there already... sometimes folks end up moving all that including old junk back to the Plug-Ins folder.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by [email protected]

thanks. now I´ve deleted prefs as you said, but now PT hangs on «initializing library content», doesn’t matter what kind of sessions I try to open, on the ssd or on the desktop. going crazy here. restarted twice: nothing.

OK that is kind of progress, at least more interesting information. It's showing this current hang problem at least is nothing to do with sessions, or the audio interface.

Because the initializing libraries step happens after the plugins load it hanging is potentially a result of a plugin problem. So did this stop happening after you moved all the .aaxplugin files out?

I should have pointed out to check that check box to trash the plugin caches in PT Prefs 2.. if you did check that trash the prefs again with that checked.

I would skip some of the troubleshooting tests for now and move to create a new admin user account and repeat the tests there and see if you get the same «initializing library content» error. The way I tend to work is just keep going forward simplifying stuff, e.g. I'll try trashing pregs, move the .aaxplugin files out, trash prefs again, not improvement I'll try with the built-in audio device, still stuck try creating a new admin user account, test from there, still with the non-core plugins left uninstalled and using the Mac's internal audio as playback engine... just rapidly moving forward continuing to simplify stuff at each step and leave stuff simplified.

Again Make sure your Mac is not using iCloud for user home directories or documents.

Pro Tools log files may help...

[[email protected]]

really appreciate yr help here! Just started to move back the plug ins. it all went well until a certain point. then a session opened but went «grey». Moved the last plugs out again. same. moved some more and opened another session and it opens fine. pretty weird. quick question: 1) when it crashed it said what plug in caused the crashed, moved it to unused folder (clean folder). other ways of identifying plug ins that are not working? and also is the cloud thing something I turn off…where? oh, and: why a new admin account, and run tests «there» you say? can you elaborate? I am 200 years old. Thanks again! If you ever come by the beautiful island of ask, I´ll buy you a beer and play you some tunes!

[Darryl Ramm]

Just started to move back the plug ins. it all went well until a certain point. then a session opened but went «grey». Moved the last plugs out again. same. moved some more and opened another session and it opens fine. pretty weird.

quick question: 1) when it crashed it said what plug in caused the crashed, moved it to unused folder (clean folder). other ways of identifying plug ins that are not working?

Pro Tools can detect a plugin crash like you saw. You can also see plugins misbehave when they are scanning or loading, maybe the whole scanning or loading of the plugins aborts or Pro Tools crashes all together... in which case it may not be the plugin name you see on the splash screen that is the faulty one, but the plugin that was immediately before that. All plugins that load into Pro Tools (not just the ones you use in a session) get to run initialization code when they load, plugins can have a multitude of problems, they may keep running even if you are not using them, they might keep allocating memory or consuming CPU, or they might go off and scribble all over Pro Tools internal memory corrupting data structures, causing all sorts of unpredictable errors, and those can vary between statups sessions etc. It's a jungle in there.

The ultimate test of how you tell if a plugin is causing problems is to do what you are doing, you move the .aaxplugin files out of the plugin folder and see if Pro Tools behaves better. The protection and error detection around a plugin is pretty minimal, which is why plugin problems (whether caused by the plugin vendor, by Avid or some combination of blame) accounts for so many problem with Pro Tools. There is also clearly not super effective plugin compatibility testing before releasing new Pro Tools versions.

and also is the cloud thing something I turn off…where?

The iCloud thing is pure Apple mess (but hey it's less of a mess than Microsoft OneDrive, but that's not saying much), it's not specific to Pro Tools so just Google how to disable that. My first returned Google search result was this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread...08?sortBy=rank

oh, and: why a new admin account, and run tests «there» you say? can you elaborate? I am 200 years old. Thanks again!

Creating a new admin account is just what is basically described in the troubleshooting guide, except I'd go one more step and grant that account you create admin privileges as well... that helps avoid some cases some permission things might cause problems. (and the account you run from normally is likely an admin account).

Why try a new account at all... well there may be lots of different things in a users account that can affect software like Pro Tools. Different apps and utilities that startup up when a user logs in, different privacy/privilege settings etc. but most especially complex macOS apps like Pro Tools and their plugins utilize a lot of crap in ~/Library, and also in the case of Pro Tools in ~/Documents for plugin settings (but not in a way that is likely to cause problems you are seeing). A new user account gets a whole new complete user ~/Library (and ~/Documents) environment for Pro Tools to run in. It's also a handy test in case the user does not trash prefs correctly, since this cleans out all of the prefs (except for the new plugin caches), but that's certainly not the only reason to do this. And just recently I've seen several folks find this a useful test that got them going.

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Now were are crossing messages a bit in this thread, when I suggested you skip to trying the new admin account I had not known that you have plugins being flagged as failing etc. So sure try the new admin account test, but just be careful to do all the troubleshooting you need to to work out what seems to be causing problems, slow down now that you are seeing interesting things/clues. Since plugins are throwing errors that's a likely sign something is just broken there. I'm not following if you have been able to get to repeatably completely OK startup and shutdown yet or not. Whether that takes moving all the .aaxplugin bundles out of the plugin folder or not or if that still left problems starting up or shutting down. Make sure you repeat stuff enough times to test for intermittent behaviors and as i said before I think it's a good idea to keep simplifying stuff, leave changes applied until you see the system behave well. Make sure you are not chasing some other problem, like a corrupt session (or sessions that share some parent session or template) causing this (if things crash before the session loads then the session is clearly not the cause). And your mind will try to find patterns that don't exist, so if you think you have seen something you might want to confirm that multiple ways, say you think you know a plugin is causing problems then take it out of the plugin folder and see what happens, and maybe put it back and see if the problem returns.

And if you are still stuck getting crashes the post those log files online, multiple log files for the failures and for successful startups/shutdowns.

If you ever come by the beautiful island of ask, I´ll buy you a beer and play you some tunes!

Never been to Ask, closest I have been is Stavanger for work for Silicon Graphics a long time ago, 3D stuff and lots of big data servers, you can guess what industry we were selling to Fjords sure are beautiful.

[[email protected]]

Thank you very much for all your help! This has been very, very helpful. Greetings from Askøy a super windy morning. P