CPU usage is holding off USB audio..Powerbook/Mbox

[jlcnyc]

Hey Mip,
I sympathize with you. As a friend of mine says..."Seems like the answer always involves spending more money!"
When you were at 10.3.5 you could of upgraded to 6.7 ($$$$) But now at 10.3.6, I guess it's the waiting game of digi qualifying the X.3.6 (unless you want to do a complete re-install...ouch!)
And guess what? TIGER is coming!

good luck

[stephen duffy]

I checked my power settings and they were all set to highest and never.. so I don't think that's the answer.. more likely the 10.3.6 issue that some folks have suggested. My laptop came with 10.3.5 installed so i don't have a choice... Is anyone from Digi listening/reading these comments..?
PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT IN THE USER FORUM...": CPU usage is holding off USB audio..Powerbook/ [Re:"
THANKS
S

[The Electric Trombone]

Is this still an ongoing issue?

[gracecale]

Our Gods Hate us All.

I continually get these error messages - especially when running Reason rewired in or simply when trying to bounce down tracks.

(Mbox, Tbook 1Gig, External Firewire drive, OS 10.2.8 , Pro Tools 6.1.2, Reason 2.5)

This happens when working with files with only 2-3 audio tracks and 2-3 midi tracks. I've tried most the solutions suggested here but nothing seems to provide any reliable fix.

The only thing that has provided any real joy is repairing & verifying disk permissions.

I'm fairly surprised that Digidesign provides such little information on this problem. ...

[KayBess]

Well, here it is November 2005... I'm running OS 10.4.3 TIGER - 1.67 Ghz on a G4 Powerbook, with Protools 6.9.2. I ONLY record one, maybe two tracks in any given session (it's for Voice over only) and I would get the "CPU usage is holding off USB audio... bla bla bla" message as soon as I hit record. I have no plug ins, I was set to 40%, and 1024, and I have been driven insane...

I just wanted to update this thread to say that it's happening in later versions of OS 10 and Pro tools. I did what everyone suggested in this thread:

H/W buffer size to 1024
cpu usage limit to 60%
Turned off journaling on the LaCie external drive where my pro tools sessions are made and stored
Under system preferences: energy saver: put computer and display asleep NEVER, and unchecked "put hard disk to sleep whenever possible"
Under "options tab" in Energy saver, put processor performance to "highest."
Turned off air port
Shut down and restarted

I made it through a short session, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

If anyone else is having this problem in the latest versions of everything, please post here and share your knowledge (and frustration..)

Thanks, K

[MrBrown]

I was getting this message, plus a really weird thing where my G5 went to sleep in conjunction with the message. In another message thread with the same title, a guy suggested I switch out the USB cables. I tried it and it seems to have fixed the problem.

I took off the USB that came with the Mbox2 and replaced it with a USB 2 cable I had on hand. I don't know if it will fix the issue on the other types of machines, but it's an easy thing to try.

[Runaway]

I get the "hold off" errors all the time too - on a Mac Mini with 10.4.2, 1GB of RAM and Lacie external HD. All my hardware and software is "certified" by DigiDesign, plus I have adjusted all the settings as recommended by DigiDesign. I still get this problem.
My system was all set up fresh out of the box and I started getting this error straight away.
This problem has come up countless times on this forum and Digi have never had any kind of answer to it - a while back they were trying to research it, but it seems they came up empty and just kind of "gave up" trying to fix it. Well, there are still plenty of us suffering from this problem, so I wish they'd stop hoping it would just go away...

[MrBrown]

I hit this wall again once after posting my last message, but then two subsequent tries went fine. It was giving me guff when I was bouncing to disc. I'm going to see how it goes.

[Riley Casey]

Show some initiative - look up 'journaling' in Mac help.

When looking up journaling in Mac help the resulting page response is ... " No pages with your search words were found ".

LOL

I just had to look - why does this not surprise me, Mac help has been going downhill for years. However your more complete response to the original question a couple of posts down was very instructive - even if the amount of overhead occasioned by journaling is not considered a problem in most other online discussions about speed bottlenecks in DAWs that I'm familiar with.

[Runaway]

DigiDesign actually recommend that Journaling is ON these days with the latest PTLE.