mbox2pro on macbook-hard drive?

[dxcease]

hi this may seem silly, but i cannot find a precise answer anywhere. how do you go about using firewire drives with the mbox2pro on a mac book... im considering buying one for recording vocals and light mixing duties until i can get a macpro, allowing me to learn osx & pt, and for field recordings, but there is only one firewire port. do you daisy chain...firewire hub...forget the macbook and go with mbp and something using the ex. card 34 port... i cant afford the 17"mbp, so any advice/help would be greatly appreciated. thanks

[chagos]

i have a macbook with a digi 002 rack and do my recording onto a audio specific firewire drive.

macbook-firewiredrive-digi002 thru firwire drive.

it is horrible. more errors than you can imagine.
dont do it.

[mosier]

You should be fine with a macbook. Get a FW drive with 2 ports and daisy chain them.

Cheers,

Jeff

[mosier]

Well, maybe not then. Sorry I hope you can figure something out.

[mosier]

Well, maybe not then. Sorry I hope you can figure something out.

[chagos]

I would suggest the mbox. it seems firewire errors are plentiful on the forum with the new macbooks.

here is a typical session with my setup. my set up is:

digi002 rack, PT 7.1 with updates current.
macbook 2.GHz 784 RAM with updates current
OS X.4.8
5400 internal macbook drive
250 GB firewire drive, 911 oxford chipset. 8.5 ml seek time.

macbook to external firewire. digi 002 daisy'd to 2nd port of external firewire.
I tired the digi002 first in the chain, but this works far worse than having it being the 2nd daisy-chain.

usually about 5 tracks, 2 mono, 3 stereo for recording.
1 instrument like sampletank LE or something as well.

i can hardly ever get more than 2 tracks to record at a time no matter what combo i use: mono+mono, mono+stereo, etc.

i get at least 5-18 errors per 70 minute session that stop playback. "buffer underun," "digi lost communication," etc.

and to bounce a session( to the external OR internal) of maybe 6 active tracks with maybe one or 2 plug ins on the master, i usually have to re-bounce at least 3 times because i get errors before the bounce has finished.

I have been using pro tools for over 6 years: the first mbox, digi 001, digi 002 and digi002 rack, HD, etc. pro tools 5 thru 7.1

this is by far the absolute worst combination i have ever used. The only thing giving me a small ray of hope is that perhaps all of my errors will dissapear when i get my new macbook 7200 rpm drive.

i have tried everything else: permissions repair, maxing the buffer, blah blah blah, etc.

[dxcease]

i actually have a mbox2 and a mbox2pro, and as pt will not run on my pc (915g chipset...doh!), i use the pro for my interface for ableton live, and the mbox2 sits in its box. so maybe i could use the mbox2 with the macbook and then use the pro when i get the macpro... what about usb limitations? i would like to get the wireless mouse and keyboard, provided they make protools key shortcut covers and another moniter (24"apple hd display) so i have the display once i get the desktop... i know digi makes the pt keyboard, but this runs off the usb... i would like to get the best possible performance for the time being. thank you guys!

[dxcease]

orrr...hows about 2.16g 17" imac... or maybe ill just wait and save and go for the macpro and use my crappy vga moniter for awhile... why cant apples grow on trees, oh wait...
i was under the impression that the macbooks were really good, but i guess the limitations excede the performance.