Constant 'AAE -9013' error in PT 2022.5

[sadandbeautiful]

Bought a brand new Mac Studio and everything has been fine until I updated to 2022.5 -- now I cannot play a single project because I get the pop-up error message "AAE -9013" within about two seconds on hitting play.

I have plenty of RAM (32 GB), so I'm sure that's not the issue.

Also, I am using the same external hard drive for files as I have always used, so that's not an issue.

There is no indication that PT is looking for a missing file. All of them show up, and no spinning indicator on the transport.

I've tried changing the buffer size, trashing prefs, reinstalling my UA Apollo Thunderbolt. All with no luck.

Anybody have any advice??

[Darryl Ramm]

If we are to believe the 9013 means looking for a missing file that you have that same external HDD as used on other systems does not mean you cannot have storage related problems. It’s not uncommon at all for folks to think they are saving stuff all to an external drive only to have a bunch of files saved to different locations outside of the session folder on other drives, left on transfer devices etc. instead of copied into the session folder. Unclear how many sessions you have… and it’s maybe possible if you do stuff the same way they all have a similar problem…but probably unlikely.

What file system is the external drive? What exact make/model/spec drive? Where are VI samples stored? Are you using VIs in the sessions.

Either way try a Save Copy In to copy the session to the internal Mac SSD, a much better place to run sessions from than slow old external hard drives. And if there is a missing file(s) hopefully Save Copy In fails with a helpful hint, and if it’s corrupt it may fix it or fail with a useful error. If it’s corrupt… you got backups?

Try with disk cache enabled, set to a size to fully cache the session (disk cache meter is all green) and try it off (normal).

Failing that, and I am not sure this really is due to a missing file, keep going with standard troubleshooting (see under “help us help you” up the top of each DUC Web page)….

Always suspect plugins, and the fact you just upgraded Pro Tools and this affects all your sessions makes plugins especially interesting so move *all* .aaxplugin files out of the plugin folder, trash prefs and restart Pro Tools and just try to see if it works OK with the few core plugins that automagically get put back. If so then you need to troubleshoot the other installed plugins to try to find which ones are causing problems.

Try with built-in audio or whatever it is called as the playback engine. (Always easier to do that vs. reinstalling interface drivers, and often a more useful test).

Try creating a new admin account, test from there, repeat stuff, remove all plugin files, trash prefs, try with a new empty session, etc.

You cannot ever assume stuff like it’s not memory because you have some amount of memory installed that you think is OK. memory leaks are a whole common class of issues with Pro Tools (and esp. plugin issues). So instead of guessing and hoping check: what does macOS Activity Monitor memory page show for the memory pressure chart down the bottom of the page? It should be mostly green. And to be fair, memory use is complex, but this is one of the useful memory things to look at “free” and some of the other stats are not useful and don’t mean what many folks seem to guess they do.

[Ben Jenssen]

Don't mind Darryl's slightly uncurtious manner.
Just pick up his advice. It's valuable.

[sadandbeautiful]

Thanks guys.

Those were helpful ideas, and as an update I did a "save a copy as..." to the internal SSD (as suggested) and absolutely everything worked fine with no errors or issues. There were no warnings popped up for lost files or trying to relocate files, it just worked.

So, as a test, I then did another "save a copy as..." back to my external drive, and this time everything is working fine again. Very strange.

As for the question about what my external drive is formatted as, it is APFS because it is also an SSD. There are no MIDI files, only audio tracks.

Thanks again for the ideas. Not sure what could have caused these issues, but for now the fix seems to be to do a "save a copy as..." when I get the error, and that seems to clear it up.