Is anyone running a native card in Mac Pro 1,1 2006?

[lancemcv]

I know this is the pro tools 10 forum but I just want to see if anyone has a Mac Pro 2006 with a native card installed and are they having issues when recording.
The setup is a 2006 quad core 3.0 ghz 8 gigs of ram running snow leopard and PT 9 hd with a native card, omni I/O with a focusrite 8 channel preamp connected to the omni via optical and word clock, the omni is the master clock, then also an HD io running in loop sync. After recording 24 tracks for a while, as this rig is for recording live performances in a club, the recording will sometimes stop and say you need to increase the buffer which is set to 512.
I'm thinking the Mac Pro may just not be up for the task.
We are getting another HD I/O and going to not have the omni / optical setup any more, but I'm thinking we need a new Mac Pro to run this setup without issues. We are running eq on every channel and one Dverb and one delay, CPU usage is at about 15% when recording.
Would just like to hear if anyone has a 2006 Mac Pro running with a native card and how its been for them when recording a fair amount of tracks for at least an hour.

[nst7]

Two things come to mind.

1. You mentioned using word clock with the Focusrite. I don't know if this will help, but see if it works better not using wordclock, but just clocking the Focusrite through Adat. Omni would still be the master clock, and you would just configure the Focusrite to be clocked externally, which means it should just automatically clock through Adat.

That may not make any difference, though.


The other thing is that if you're just recording a live performance, and no one actually needs to hear it to track with it, couldn't you just set it at the highest buffer of 1024? If no one needs to hear it to track with it like in the studio, then latency is not an issue, so there's no reason to set it at a lower buffer. Unless I'm missing something in the way you have it set up.

[lancemcv]

Thanks for the ideas. Yeah my first thought was the focusrite may be at fault here and the first thing I was going to do was remove it from the setup and see if it made a difference but that's a good idea to remove the word clock to see if it helps. I'm pretty sure the focusrite manual showed you needed the word clock unless you ran it as the master via adat. I was getting the occasional ticks on tracks the first time I used the rig and got a clock error and it stopped recording, the next time I tried I was not getting the ticks but the rig stopped after 40 minutes saying to increase the buffer so there may be something to the clock being the issue. We just bought another HD IO 16x16 for a great price for more inputs so soon I won't need the focusrite to run to the omni via adat. We will just have 2 HD I/Os running and remove the omni as I am going to take that to my studio as I just bought a native card with PT10 HD for my rig.

As far as buffer goes we do a live video broadcast sometimes while recording, I think the buffer set that high would look too behind the video, to me I can already see a slight lag.