Pt 11 mac no longer working right

[terryrocks]

I had a session a couple weeks ago that went pretty well. Guy decided he wanted to do some edits at home so I connected an external hd, noticed it uad someone's old pt session(From different studio) tried to open a session, could not, then formatted the hd, copied the new session files over and the guy was able to do edits at home.
However, on my end, ever since i've had nothing but problems.
My in/out prefs have changed, pt takes a really long time to communicate with my studio hd (not the external the musician has), and no loger will record. When I arm tracks and tell it to record it does the blinking play-stop buttons simultaneously.
I trashed pt prefs and this didn't help.
Any ideas?

[Eric Seaberg]

Give us more info on your system. Computer and OS, interface, PT version, etc.

[albee1952]

Step #1 is to trash prefs. Maybe you had your IO set to allow sessions to overwrite settings(a checkbox)? You will likely need to restore your IO setup, including deleting any odd paths that show in italics(which means they are invalid or mis-routed). I am going thru this here as I just received a portable drive with sessions to mix. They were done on an older system(PT7) and I forgot to uncheck that little box and all my IO settings are a mess. Each session I open requires me to go thru and delete some paths, rename the main outputs and re-assign the rest of the outputs.

[Darryl Ramm]

Yes geez some info would help.

All these external drives are what exact make/model drives and are formatted with what filesystem? They pass disk verify?

Maybe even something really basic... like did you have the correct playback engine selected? It's an easy mistake to make.

Test as well by using the Built-in Output as the playback engine and see if that works.

One problem like this with some interface and drivers can be fixed by toggling the playback buffer size in Pro Tools or the interface control panel. But we can't guess what interface you have. Also hopefully whatever interface you have you do not have that set to OS X system sound output or in use by any other app.

When you trash prefs make sure you are following the correct instructions for your OS version (which we can't guess).

What has changed on your Mac? Have you installed any updates? Is your Mac fully optimized? Auto updates turned off? or did you get shot by an update?

If trashing prefs does not help, then also try creating a new account with admin preferences and test from there.

This can also be a sign of a corrupt session. Do other sessions do this? If not then try a Save In of the current session or create a new session and import the existing session content into that one if you have to.