Upgrading from Mbox to Digi 002R

[Alhuero]

I've been running PT 6.1.2 LE for some time on a partitioned drive (OSX 10.2.8 on one side, OS 9.2.x) on the other. It's worked fine for over a year. I just puchased an 002R and am having trouble getting it to work. Initially I just plugged in the 002R and relaunched Protools. It recognized the 002 and updated the firmware. Sessions loaded ok but playback was plagued by 6084, 6085 and 6093 errors. I tried changing the hardware and playback settings, including ignoring of buffer underrun errors without luck. Playback would stop after about 5 seconds every time. I've since tried uninstalling and reinstalling Protools several times; including trying the suggestions in the bulletin at the top of this forum. At this point Protools won't even recognize the 002R. It's plugged in; I've tried different fire wire cables--and as near I can tell the fiirewire connection is ok, as the green light on the back of the unit is lit. The front light however won't light up anymore. I'd very much appreciate any thoughts or suggestions. I'm still able to hook the Mbox back up and get it to work, but not the 002R.

I'm running everything on a 2002 Powermac G4 (2 firewire ports), single 800 MHz processor with 1.5 GB of RAM. I have two external firewire hard drives, connected to one of the firewire ports on the G4 in series. The 002R is connected to the other firewire port. When it was working previously, the 002R was connected to one of the ports on one of the external drives. It doesn't seem to work in either configuration at this point.

Thanks in advance.

[DJ Insomaniac]

how much of the audio is coming in from the FW drives? i've had problems when streaming video off of FW drives.

[Alhuero]

All of the audio files are on the external drives. Only the Protools program is on the internal drive. I've been browsing here awhile and ist seems that the 6085, 6086, and 6093 errors are common with the 002R. If I can get the system back to recognizing the 002R, and may try installing a PCI card bus for the firewire drives (though this seems bizarre, it they run ok with the Mbox currently).

[DJ Insomaniac]

well, the Mbox is on the USB bus. if you have the FW drives and the 002r on the same FW bus, then you might have buffer issues.

[Alhuero]

Maybe so. I was able to get the system to recognize the 002R; after a hard re-boot (complete power down after trashing everything) as well as deleting the volume directories on the external drives. Sessions with few tracks/plug-ins play back ok. Sessions that ran fine on the Mbox (more tracks and plugins) bog down almost instantly with a 6093 error. I think I'm off to Fry's to get a PCI card and see if that fixes the problem. And here I thought that a firewire connection would blow doors off the performance of the USB interface. Would that it were that easy.

[DJ Insomaniac]

well, with the 18 possible I/O channels AND the audio coming in one the SAME bus, it's like a bottlekneck. It's stupid, i know, but some things just can't be helped, i guess.

[JFreak]

just add another firewire buss to your system - via pci or pcmcia. that helps. costs a hundred.

[Alhuero]

Yep, got the PCI firewire bus card, plugged the drives into that, and problem solved. Digi should start shipping cards with the 002R; or at least make reference to it in the "Getting Started" guide.