audio interface not working after upgrade to 10.3.2

[B2RPW]

HI all, I accidentally upgraded my OS to Mountain Lion and then started having some buggy behavior in PT 10 so I did a clean uninstall and installed PT 10.3.2 Although the install seems to be fine, I can no longer get audio into PT via my Tascam DM 4800 mixer that has a 32 channel firewire audio interface card. PT sees the card and it appears in my I/O setup and is chosed in the playback engine, but every time I try to click play in PT i get the error "Problem detected with audio clock. Check that your clock source and sample rate are correct."

I've checked everywhere I know to check to be sure everythign is set to the same clock source and sample rate but nothing seems to work. I'm fairly confident signal is flowing correctly from my Mic/line inputs on the board to the FW card outputs, but for some reason its not flowing into Pro tools correctly.

Any thoughts?

[crizdee]

Originally Posted by B2RPW

HI all, I accidentally upgraded my OS to Mountain Lion and then started having some buggy behavior in PT 10 so I did a clean uninstall and installed PT 10.3.2 Although the install seems to be fine, I can no longer get audio into PT via my Tascam DM 4800 mixer that has a 32 channel firewire audio interface card. PT sees the card and it appears in my I/O setup and is chosed in the playback engine, but every time I try to click play in PT i get the error "Problem detected with audio clock. Check that your clock source and sample rate are correct."

I've checked everywhere I know to check to be sure everythign is set to the same clock source and sample rate but nothing seems to work. I'm fairly confident signal is flowing correctly from my Mic/line inputs on the board to the FW card outputs, but for some reason its not flowing into Pro tools correctly.

Any thoughts?

Hi,

I would try trashing the AMS prefs...

Go to MacHD>Users>your account>Library>Preferences and trash 'com.apple.audio.audiomidisetup.plist'.

Also any prefs for the tascam you find! Also uninstall the tascam drivers and re-install.

Check AMS /tascam control panel and PT all have the same frequency and bit rate.

Might even be tempted to uninstall and reinstall PT which will just replace the fundamental or tools files and won't effect any third party plugins etc.


Chris

[ejwells]

I guess I'm confused as to how one would "accidentally" upgrade to Mountain Lion?

[B2RPW]

Originally Posted by ejwells

I guess I'm confused as to how one would "accidentally" upgrade to Mountain Lion?

That's a fair question. A bit of background first - I'm a musician and owner of a music school, not a professional engineer. In my school we built a full recording studio to be able to both record our school bands, rent out the studio to local bands, and run our "rockstar birthday parties" where we let the birthday kids play along to backing tracks and mix their performances and vocals in with the backing tracks so they go home with an mp3 of their work (don't worry we legally acquire the rights to any songs we mix).

Although we hired professional sound people and engineers to design, build and install the studio, I've been trying to get myself up to speed to be able to at least engineer the birthday parties and school bands. We bring in pros for the heavy lifting and any outside projects.

Starting from my base of solid home recording on a windows PC running Reaper all in the box, I'm now running a Tascam DM 4800 board into Protools on a Mac. Although I'm putting in 5+ hours a day and progressing well with my ability to record live and midi instuments, mix tracks and bounce down to a decent end product in PT, it wouldn't be a huge exageration to say I've bitten off about as much as anyone can chew.

So to answer your question, I was deep into a video on recording drum technique when an innocuous little dialog box popped up on the mac saying it was time to upgrade the OS. Without giving it any attention becasue I was very involved in what I was learning (the Decca tree technique, in case you're wondering), I clicked ok and next thing you know my mac was rebooting with the new OS. I immediately got a sinking feeling that I did something stupid and when PT opened I was relieved. But it starting acting buggy and that led me to upgrade to the lastest version of PT...

Sorry for the long explanation but I didn't want you to think I was just a glactically stupid noob. Now you can more accurately characterize me as just a distracted stupid noob. :)

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by B2RPW

So to answer your question, I was deep into a video on recording drum technique when an innocuous little dialog box popped up on the mac saying it was time to upgrade the OS. Without giving it any attention because I was very involved in what I was learning (the Decca tree technique, in case you're wondering), I clicked ok and next thing you know my mac was rebooting with the new OS. I immediately got a sinking feeling that I did something stupid and when PT opened I was relieved. But it starting acting buggy and that led me to upgrade to the latest version of PT...

Sorry for the long explanation but I didn't want you to think I was just a glactically stupid noob. Now you can more accurately characterize me as just a distracted stupid noob. :)

But you learned an important lesson and that is to never enable automatic updates on ANY computer or software as it could lead to unintended consequences. One possible thing you can try is to backdate your version of OSX to Lion (assuming that's what you had initially).

[B2RPW]

Originally Posted by musicman691

But you learned an important lesson and that is to never enable automatic updates on ANY computer or software as it could lead to unintended consequences. One possible thing you can try is to backdate your version of OSX to Lion (assuming that's what you had initially).

Absolutely, lesson well learned.

But what's more interesting is the conclusion to this story. So yesterday morning I got to the studio about an hour before my engineer would arrive and PT worked perfectly. I literally walked in, shook the mouse to wake up the Mac from its screen saver and hit play. The only variabes that occured between PT not working the prior evening and working in the morning were that the mac went into sleep mode over night and they screen sharing program that the phone tech support guy was using was closed. Aside from that the state of all hardware and software was exactly the same other than than 12 hours passing.

I was able to open existing sessions, create new ones, add tracks and record both audio and midi. I even changed the board from 44.1 to 48 sample rate and could operate at both settings.


While I'm relieved it fixed itself I'm quite worried that I don't know what caused the problem or what fixed it. Lets see if it happens again.

Thanks for all the help and ideas and I'm sure you'll see my on the boards again as I run into other brick walls.

[ejwells]

disabling sleep mode is something else you'll want to do

[B2RPW]

Why should I disable sleep mode? I haven't noticed any unwanted effects from it so far? I know on a pc it causes lots of instability returning to awake state, but I thought a Mac is supposed to handle that a lot more elegantly.

On a related topic, where do you stand on the topic of shutting down/rebooting both the mixing board and Mac regularly? I've been leaving both running 24x7 for the most part but I've gotten mixed opinions on whether its best to reboot regularly or just leave it running.

[ejwells]

Originally Posted by B2RPW

Why should I disable sleep mode? I haven't noticed any unwanted effects from it so far? I know on a pc it causes lots of instability returning to awake state, but I thought a Mac is supposed to handle that a lot more elegantly.

On a related topic, where do you stand on the topic of shutting down/rebooting both the mixing board and Mac regularly? I've been leaving both running 24x7 for the most part but I've gotten mixed opinions on whether its best to reboot regularly or just leave it running.

Of course Macs handle sleep mode issues more elegantly than a PC. Macs handle all things more elegantly than a PC, but problems can occur, especially with drives going into/coming out of sleep mode, and especially when sessions are left open.

I shut my gear down at the end of every day (at least).
Sometimes I reboot everything just for the heck of it, when I'm going to take a break, or start a new session.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by B2RPW

Why should I disable sleep mode? I haven't noticed any unwanted effects from it so far? I know on a pc it causes lots of instability returning to awake state, but I thought a Mac is supposed to handle that a lot more elegantly.

On a related topic, where do you stand on the topic of shutting down/rebooting both the mixing board and Mac regularly? I've been leaving both running 24x7 for the most part but I've gotten mixed opinions on whether its best to reboot regularly or just leave it running.

The computer and peripherals can and will lose connectivity when in sleep mode - even on a Mac. Macs do a lot of things well but they are not perfect (and I'm a Mac lover from way back). What can happen is the computer comes out of sleep mode before a peripheral does and the computer won't always see the peripheral (that's why it's generally accepted that you boot up all peripherals before booting up the computer).

As to shutting down the Mac and your mixing board regularly - if you won't be using them for any length of time (say anything longer than an hour or two) - shut everything down. No need to waste energy, Certainly shut down overnight when no one's using the system. And rebooting the computer on a regular basis - if you notice the system getting sluggish a reboot may well help, especially in reclaiming ram. Not all programs properly release ram back in to general use and there are still programs that have memory leaks. iStat Pro used to be a great widget program for showing memory usage but I believe it hasn't been updated for Mountain Lion.