Opening a PT session freezes my PC

[cthorp7]

Hi,
I've recently started up my old PT sessions and it regularly freezes my PC, but not always. If i start with an empty session it is OK, but anything else will cause my windows PC to lock up 4 out of 5 times (needing me to cut the power to the PC to fix it).

I'm about to upgrade my PC and Pro Tools version ... i'm not sure whether I should try to fix this problem before the upgrade, or hope the upgrade (and re-installation) will sort things out.

I currently use PT LE 8 with a Digi 003 Rack on Win 7 32-bit. I'm about to upgrade to PT 11 and go to Win 8 64-bit.

Chris.

[Darryl Ramm]

Start by reading the "Help us Help You - READ THIS Before Posting!" link on this page and post a Sandra report. That provides an awful lot of useful information.

How many sessions cause problems? It is not unusual at all to have an occasional corrupted session. In which case you can create a new session and import the audio content etc. into the new session.

Because this is a fairly common sort of problem I'd tend to try to spend a little time fixing this before upgrading. If you can't then just upgrade and deal with it later if its still there.

Also exactly where in the session are things hanging, exactly what do you see on the screen when things appear to hang? This could be anything, including plugin problems. Check all your plugins are up to date.

Hold down the "N" key when Pro Tools is starting up or go to the Playback engine settings and confirm the playback engine you have selected is what you expect.

[albee1952]

With LE, the N key won't help much. But 2 things come to mind. #1, since you have Windows 7, you NEED 8.0.5. #2, I agree thst it could be a plugin, so remember this little trick; hold the SHIFT key while you open one of these sessions. That will make all plugins inactive. If the session opens and runs without freezing, then its most likely a plugin. Once you know its a plugin, then its a process of elimination

[Darryl Ramm]

Ah yes, my mistake... missed the "LE".

[bobch]

I'd try to reinstall software in this case.

[cthorp7]

Thanks for the help guys.

Indeed i have patched up to 8.0.5 already so that's ok. I hadn't read the "Help us help you" bit above ... so that was good and i'll post the Sandra report shortly. The Windows tips about deleting the preferences and databases is a good one to know.

Alas ... i still have my issue.

But i've now trouble-shooted it further and worked out it has something to do with the Kontact 4 plugin. i.e I've found out it's only the sessions that use this that have problems. When I open one of these sessions it occasionally flashes up a Kontact 4 (cmd) prompt screen v briefly whilst it's loading. If this happens .. i find my whole PC will freeze about ~10 seconds later. This is usually after everything is loaded and ready to go, but sometimes it doesn't quite get that far.

As mentioned ... I'm about to re-install everything on a new Windows 8 machine, so i might leave this for now (and just avoid using Kontact 4).

Unless someone can advise an obvious way to repair this ... .

[The Weed]

Move the plug-in to the Unused Plug-Ins folder.

Cheers,

[Darryl Ramm]

Why are you rushing to leave Windows 7, a supported OS for LE 8, and move to Windows 8 an unsupported OS? There are lots of great Windows 7 PCs available or you could use 8 Pro downgrade rights. There is just no reason to go to Windows 8 for most Pro Tools users, and many reasons to avoid it.

Darryl

[PatriotsBiker]

There were some issues with Kontakt. The player is free, so get the latest aax that you can and use that. I fought with this for a month (off an on) to ended up turning on and off DEP protection or something like that. The new version of Kontakt fixed this for me, and no problems with it since. Other issue abound, sure, but that's par for the course when adding versions and new plugs every month. This has made my music making slow right down, though.