PTLe on PC to and from HD on Mac, need some input please.

[Bill_Urick]

Sorry if this has been covered before, we are working back and forth between Le on a PC and HD on a Mac. My understanding is that a drive formatted FAT32 with enforce PC/Mac compatibility checked should be able to move seamlessley between systems. When trying to open sessions on the HD/Mac system we are unable to designate the drive as a recording drive. Any suggestions?

[albee1952]

A few things to keep in mind. Vista will not work with FAT32 drives(but XP will). What version of PT is on each system. For instance, if the HD is running 7.x but the LE system runs 6.x, when working on the HD system, you need to SAVE AS and choose 6.x compatible. As for the problem of designating drive as a record volume, I'm no MAC expert(bot others here certainly are) but can you possible drag the session folder onto another drive in the MAC system?

[spkguitar]

Very seriously, the best thing to do at this point is to format the drive as HFS+ on the mac. With any modern version of Pro Tools on the windows side, (7.3 or above) you will be able to playback and record directly to the drive. Since it's already mac formatted for the mac you can do the same thing on the mac.

As albee mentioned, the only issue you have to contend with is the version numbers.

[Bill_Urick]

Thanks guys. Both systems are running version 7.x. And you won't see me installing Vista on anything anytime soon. I didn't know XP would read HFS+. I'll check into that. But I thought Macs would record to FAT32 as well.

Edit-Isn't MacDrive required to read the Mac formatted drives on XP?

[Gatekeeper]

Yes it is, and I for one can attest that with MacDrive, my HFS+ volumes mount just fine, as both Record and Playback volumes, on both my 7.4 Vista rig at home and the 6.4 HD rigs at work. A steal at 50 bucks

Thanks guys. Both systems are running version 7.x. And you won't see me installing Vista on anything anytime soon. I didn't know XP would read HFS+. I'll check into that. But I thought Macs would record to FAT32 as well.

Edit-Isn't MacDrive required to read the Mac formatted drives on XP?

[mano111]

macdrive isn't required if you install the Mac HFS+ support thet comes with PT 7.4.

[spkguitar]

PT 7.3 was the last version to support FAT32 drives. On both platforms.

[Bill_Urick]

Thanks for all the input, guys. Been working a lot and not paying any attention at all to PT developments.

I'm running 7.1 with the music production toolkit on XP, the studio is running 7.1 or 7.3, not sure, on OSX.something. It seems my best bet is to upgrade at home to 7.4 for $75.00 rather than buy MacOpen for $50.00. Then we format the drives on the Mac at the studio and all is good. Right?

Are there any issues re this upgrade that I should be aware of? Is there anything really useful in the 7.1-7.3 upgrade, besides the elastic time stuff? We're just doing straight audio recording, no MIDI at this time at all.

[mano111]

yeah go for it.

goto the digi site and type "new in 7.3" in the serch. then open the pdf with that name and goto page 16. it explains all about the newly added hfs+ support in 7.3.

there is tons of new stuff in 7.3 especially interface and editing related, and 7.4 has elastic audio a great feature.