CPU Overload Error

[Souza]

I wasn't able to take a picture of the error, but it's the same CPU error you've all most likely seen, where it says to increase your buffer size, -6101?

I have a brand new macbook pro 2.93 ghz beast with 4 gb of ram.

Here's what I was doing.

I was recording a live concert, 8 inputs on a projectmix i\o, at 96k(connected to onboad fw 800); onto an external WD mybook firewire HD(connected to express fw 400 card). I had already setup the night before and recorded roughly 2 and a half hours with absolutely no problems. Then at the actual performance, I had it do "cpu overload" two different times and lost a few seconds of two songs(aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!). After I switched the buffer to 1024 it didn't do it again. I have a hard time believing it was the buffer when I had no problems the night before.

Any ideas on what might have caused this? I have to be able to trust my setup, and right now, I can't until I figure this out.

Thanks for your help!

[hypno]

As a place to start, bring up your activity monitor, and look at the cpu usage ongoing. Check to see if there are periodic cpu spikes when you have your Mbox or 002 or 003 rack hooked up. I have had a significant problem of consistent cpu spikes with no solution with an Mbox 2, with high cpu pings every 50 seconds or so. If you have too much going on, the buffer won't be able to handle when the cpu is out of headroom, and you'll get the -6101 error and the session will shut down, at the most difficult and unexpected times. It's less of a problem with an original Mbox. I also get the pings from using my digi002 rack, but not as much as the Mbox 2. Digi says it's a mac problem and Apple says its a Digi problem. I'm going to ask about this on a separate thread.

best

hypno

[Dozerbabar]

I have the exact same problem and my mac has been able to tun sessions MUCH larger than what it does now.

A lot of the M-audio hardware MUST be on it's own FW-bus. It helped for a few days, but now I'm back in the same never ending CPU-fail loop

[paulmitch]

Are you running any plug-ins? Is there a reason you don't want to record with a higher buffer setting?