Please Help!!! Pro Tools and FW 1814

[sethbrand]

Ok. My house was robbed and the idiots took my macbook and ext. H/D, which I ran PT M-Powered 7.1.1 with. Here was my set up:

M-Audio FW 1814 going to macbook via FW 400
M-Audio FW 1814 also going to ext. H/D via FW 400

Worked beautifully.

So now, I bought a new imac and a new ext. H/D (same brand). My problem is this. I have the ext. H/D connected to the imac via FW 800, and then have my 1814 running off my ext. H/D via FW 400 cable. When I open up i-tunes and play a cd...it sounds fine through my monitors.

HOWEVER!!!! When I open Pro Tools I get a freaking world of problems. First, when I try to record, it has a bunch of digital pops, and noises throughout the recording as if a robot was yelling in the room. Terrible. So then I imported a track from a cd into Pro Tools to see if it would play, and it don't. It plays for a minute, then skips around, then plays, skips, etc. I have swapped out the FW cables, and get the same results. This same thing was happening when I tried to download a free version of Reaper as well. So something is not communicating right between my DAW and interface. I have played with all the settings and everything looks just fine.

The FW 1814 was set to 44.1khz, as was the session. I have just installed the newest drivers for it as well, still the same results. Nothing is fixing this. Could it be that I am daisy chaining with a FW800 and FW400 cable??? Should I buy an adapter and run everything through FW400??? Please help. I just had to tell a client to go home after he sat here for an hour watching me curse this thing. I'm pretty frustrated with all this at this point!!!

Also,

My imac only has a FW800 jack. So that is going to my ext. H/D and connecting to the FW800 jack on it. Then I'm connecting a FW400 cable from my ext. H/D's 400 jack to the m-audio 400 jack. I am thinking this is the problem, but have no solution as my computer does not have a 400 jack. The only solution is to get an interface with an 800 jack...which is not something I want to have to do.

[Eric Seaberg]

If you search in THIS CONFERENCE, you will find TONS of recent threads about this. There is a particular order you need to 'daisy chain' your interface and external drive, all coming from one FW port.

The issue you're having is a -6101 cpu problem, so do a search and find your answer.

Good luck.

[sethbrand]

Eric,

I would like to say that while I did receive that CPU error once or twice, my main issue is electronic sounding noises when trying to record. I record, and on playback there are electronic glitches of some sort. Now, they may be related, but I don't know. Like I said, it plays just fine from i-tunes...just not when recording or using pro tools. It's probably something to do with my external.

After doing a search I found that the ideal path is imac-->drive-->interface. This is what I'm doing. HOWEVER...I did find that I need to be using all FW400 if possible. The problem, my computer ONLY has one FW800 port and that is it! So, my question now is if I buy a 400 to 800 cable, will this solve my problem. Or would it be better to get a hub of some kind? The bottom line is my imac has one port, and it's FW800...I need this to work with the stuff I got, so will an adapter fix the issue?

Thanks

[Eric Seaberg]

Again, there are posts about this. I believe there's a FW800->FW400 cable that makes it real simple to accomplish.

iTunes would play fine because it's looking at the internal drive where your music is, then streaming it out to the interface. The bitrate of your iTunes music is 1Mb at best (Apple Lossless). it's a LOT less if you're really playing MP3s.

What you're hearing is 'traffic congestion' due to the firewire buss trying to get audio from the hard-drive, process it, and push it back out the same firewire buss to the interface.

Keep searching....