D-Command stopped recording - help please?

[banana boy]

I have a newish D-Command ES that has been working just great until today. Suddenly, after recording arming a track (or multiple tracks), pressing record and then play (or even trying to hold them down together) drops the session out of record and into play. Recording from the keyboard (F12, F3 etc) or mousing onto the transport window all work perfectly; just cannot record from the D-Command. I searched the forum - the one other mention of this was cured with trashing pref's and repairing disks - tried this but no joy.

So here's what I've got:

MacPro 2.66 Quad core Intel Xeon; 3G Ram, running OSX 10.6.4
PT8.1 HD on an HD Accel 3 system
D-Command ES, 2x192's, Sync I/O. PRE
Lots of legal and 8.1 compatible plugs (Waves, Soundtoys etc)

Here's what I've tried ...

Hardware tests all say all good (Accel cards as well as button tests on the board); reloaded firmware; reset the board; reset all D-Command preferences, trashed all PT preferences, repaired system drive permissions, "repaired" all drives; tried new and older sessions, tried default I/O configs and originals saved with known working sessions (where tracking has been all good); power cycled the board and X-Mon with system up and with system down.

Really confusing - everything seems absolutely 100% except for the fact that I can't initiate recording from the transport buttons on the D-Command.

Anyone had this before? Any advice please?

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[Stig Eliassen]

Well, you seem to have done everything I would suggest you'd do. I always cure strange issues by trashing PT prefs, and I use JC's app to do it. Have you tried it?

[thierryd]

recording button on D-Control / D-Command not working anymore after upgrade or other situation has been documented here on DUC before. Trashing prefs should help.

Greetings,

Thierry

[banana boy]

Thanks guys.

I've always used the Trash Pref's app - works well, but as stated didn't help here. What's confusing too is that this happened out of the blue - no upgrades or other changes - one day the board was good, the next day it didn't work.

I also disabled the ethernet peripherals, re-scanned and re-enabled the D-Command under I/O setup. Still no joy. Really crazy - everything else is all good!?

Any other ideas?

[banana boy]

Some extra info ...

I have a Punchlight RAG light. The master record armed amber chevron light comes on as soon as the record button is pressed, and the transport window record light flashes red as soon as the D-Command record button is pressed - so the system is seeing the button press. Then when Play is pressed, the RAG light drops out of "armed/yellow" and the whole system is in play. This happens even with count-off enabled/disabled, with pre-roll enabled/disabled. As stated though if I use the keyboard or the mouse the system works just fine with/without countoff and/or pre-roll.

So confused ...

[Stig Eliassen]

Well, the only thing I can say is that ICON problems seems to happen out of the blue. Can't record with pre-roll? Trash prefs and it's back. Mark in/out buttons doesn't work during playback? Trash prefs. And every time there's an issue with the console, I can still use the keyboard/trackball to do it.

[banana boy]

Thanks for the sympathy Stig. Still working at clearing it ...

[Stig Eliassen]

Which recording mode are you using? Does changing it, possibly after trashing prefs, help at all?

[banana boy]

Interestingly track punch works - if I start "recording" with the play button, then punch in hitting the record button - all good, regions are recorded as they should be, but no other mode works.

I re-installed 8.1 from scratch and still have the same symptom. This is feeling like a D-Command or X-Mon hardware issue, even though testing the buttons works just fine.

Feels weird to be the only guy on the planet to have seen this though ...

[banana boy]

Woooo hoooo!!!!!!!!!

I've always relied on Jean Charles Deshaise's trash pref's app - and it's always worked for me in the past. With this error I had tried trashing everything with it (all check boxes ticked - I usually leave the OSX/MIDI stuff alone) again and again and still no joy; so ...

I went and looked at the digi troubleshooting guides again (haven't done this for 100 years or so) - specifically the "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Optimizations and Troubleshooting" page (which of course wasn't there 100 years ago). This time I manually went through the prefs trashing following the instructions in Phil Jackson's video on that page. I also followed the "ZAP pram" instructions; rebooted and ... my trusty D-Command is back firing again on all cylinders - thank you Digi!

So although I'm not certain which of these steps fixed the problem (trashed pref's properly or ZAP'd pram), I would like to offer a friendly caution to those of you using JC's app ... maybe it doesn't quite clean all the pref's the way an HD8.1 system needs, or (much more likely), like me you maybe don't have the latest version?? Further investigation revealed I was using version 2.0 of the app. The latest "tested with 8.0.3" is version 2.3! I've downloaded this and will use it in future.

Thanks to Stig and Thierry for stopping by to help. Thanks too to JC for putting it out there and keeping it current!