The Thread About Pro Tools (Mac OS X)

[Isolation]

yeah, whenever a brand new OS rolls out, wait a few versions later as a lot of the bugs are worked out of them by then...i'm still on OS 9 as i had heard of a lot of OS X nightmares in various magazines and from online friends' experiences...the last time i strolled through apple.com i noticed they were advertising for the latest incarnation of OS X...'Tiger'...and i'm about to upgrade myself here very soon (i hope) as well as getting new hardware, i'm planning on getting a powerbook and this will not only be my first time using a different OS but as well as having a laptop, when it comes to desktop macs and OS'es 8.5-9.2.2 i know them inside and out...so i have a boat load of learning to do...which is good as i needed a new challenge anyway...also, for everyone who uses their precious macs for everything else besides music, i strongly encourage you all to partition your large drives, this comes in very handy when you need to boot up from another source for maintenance reasons...this is something i can't stress enough...

[Code6Dave]

I'm having trouble.


everthing i'm overdubbing onto already tracked sessions in LE is out of synch by a few samples...

this started when i hooked up a minime as the external clock source.... i understand there might be some latency/delay in the spdif input.. is this something i can compensate for? or am i going to have to manually nudge everthing forward?

Also... this is now happening whether i track through the apogee... or through an analog input.... AND whether the apogee is the clock OR the internal clock of the 002 is controlling.

any ideas?

thanks
zack

Well everything you overdubb in protools is a few samples behind the original recording. It's a difficult concept to grasp why the gellious gods of digita audio haven't addrssed the issue till now ( PT6 now has delay compensation }
I cut my teeth on digital performer which has a delay comp. set up preferences in which you measured the delay and through trial and errer would tweek the record and play delay in.Everything would play together so tight, even midi !
In PT 5 there was no such abillity so I got used to selecting the overdubbed track/tracks and option H is the shortcut for shift and nudged the tracks earlier by 1157 samples (the actual number of samples you need to shift is determined by the system you are working on and the play and record buffer settings.It's preaty eazy to to measure it.
Just Record midi hat 1/8th notes ,like 4 bars. Then record that hat to an audio track. Now , send that audio out of the interface and back in to anouther track ajacent to the first. Now zoom to sample level and measure how far apart they are. Now you know how much to nudge your overdubbs.
Luckily the shift menu would hold my setting till I closed the session
Much love,

[samwinston123]

I just moved over to a mac based system ad started running protools LE 6.4. Everything's working great but I'm wanting to get a firewire drive to record to. I've got a firewire 800 port, but i noticed that the digidesign site lists only a few "compatible" drives. most of which are avid drives. Anybody have any other, more affordable brands that they've had a good experience recording to in LE 6.4?

I've been using a Western Digital 120 Gb "special edition" for about a year now, and I haven't had a single problem with it. It has both firewire and usb 2.0 (which is nice to have when recording with the 002 already taking up the firewire bus).

The thing about true firewire 800 drives is that they have to work in a raid formation (as in, there are two physical drives in the box) because firewire 800 is much faster than the actual access/bridge speeds of any normal hard drive. The scary part about raid is that if you lose a file, it could be on either drive, because it has to operate by accessing files from both drives simulaneously. Just something to think about.

[joel hamilton]

A good FW400 drive should be fine. unless the drive is severely fragmented, the DAE buffer handles the throughput regardless of how much you throw at it.

[joel hamilton]

lame. double post.

[snark]

brado32: the biggest difference between LE and TDm is Time Division Multiplexing where a multiplexer interleaves separate signals into one stream blah, blah, blah. I don't know all the science.

BTW: I think the sound quality of LE vs TDM would have a lot to do with the converters and if the TDM were running at 192 (which I haven't known LE to be capable of)

yardleyone:

I assume that if you have a FW 800 port on a Mac, then you have a G5. I don't exactly understand why you want to use a FW drive for recording when you can have a SATA drive inside your computer. SATA is much faster than FW as far as drives are concerned. My G5 came with one drive, and I added a 200G SATA for less than the same sized FW. I think maybe because Digi talks about FW drives a lot, most users think that's what's best to record to. Also, no ProTools versions have been declared compatible with FW800, in fact they have all been declared INcompatible. Apparently you can't even plug any device into the 800 prt while PT is running.

I set up my machine a little differently, though. Since FW400 is perfectly fast enough for OSX and PTLE (not approved by Digi or Apple, BTW) I have a FW drive for my system and software (yes, I boot from an external.) I set up the two internal drives as a RAID scheme (disk utility) and record to them. Fastest setup yet. Also, until I got my machine up to 4G RAM (it's beyond that now) I had lots of probs. It's great now, at least until I can afford a DSP farm.

Also, good to remember (you may know all this, but just in case): drives should be Mac OS extended (not journaled if you're ok with that), repair permissions after any installation of software, or whenever you think to do it (can't really hurt to do it often), processor to "highest", computer sleeps "never", no energy saving stuff, if processor is dual, cpu usage in PTLE set to 99%, and all that other good stuff that Digi says (it all helps, really!)

I personally say disconnect printers, scanners, internet, any hubs, any devices you're not using, stuff that runs in the background shouldn't be running, empty trash, make sure you don't have old versions of PT hanging around, If you have a bunch of sessions clogging up your drive, store them somewhere else (THAT'S what a FW drive is great for.)

I would highly recommend using a separate computer for balancing your checkbook and buying stuff on Ebay. Old G4's are really cheap now. I don't know if I'd want my PT rig on the internet.

[countjoffrey]

one of the main selling points for me to get a TDM rig over an LE rig, was timecode since about 70% of what I do is for television, , export sessions as text (ie. Edl's) also higher tracks counts, the ability to use the farm cards for extra processing power, calibration mode for adjusting the input and ouput levels of your I/O so they match your mixing console, no latency monitoring during tracking, and many editing functions not found on LE systems. I think it's just whatever the individuals needs are. you don't want to make smores with a flamethrower, and conversely you don't want to make them with matches. by the way I've run/recorded sessions on a FW800 no problem and FW 400 drives, but I like using internal drives the best, and prefer FW for backup.
just my 2?

[dubold]

I'm running into some problems with my home setup-- a 1.25 Ghz g4 Powerbook, with a gig of ram, running PT 6.4 on the 002r. I keep getting kernel panics or crashes, and I'm not sure what the culprit is. I'm recording to an external FW drive (LaCie). It's FW 800, which someone claimed wasn't compatible a few posts back. It seemed like these crashes were more likely when running Reason as a ReWire device, although I'm not so sure, since I crashed over the weekend just while tracking. We're not even talking high track count here... maybe 6 tracks.

(btw, i'm in 10.3.5, although this has been happening with every version since 10.3. I've tried upgrading the firmware on the 002 as well )



any help/suggestions as to where to start troubleshooting would be appreciated.

-d

[todd aschoff]

I am using a Powerbook G4, 002 rack and a Lacie FWhard drive.
I am running the sessions (as in saving and retrieving) off of the LaCie.
Getting CPU usage problems with plug ins, and sometimes just in bounces.
what should I change??

Also, Amplitude is unable to help me get my plug ins going even with the proper numbers, ouch. anyone know how to get me out of demo mode with the numbers - thanks

[Family Hoof]

Getting CPU usage problems with plug ins, and sometimes just in bounces.
what should I change??

You think that's bad? I'm using an iBook G3/500 and working on the internal drive (5400 rpm 10 gig, ouch!). Here's what I've done to squeeze every last bit of juice out of it during mixing:

1) Under setups > playback engine - set the H/W buffer size and CPU usage limit to the highest setting possible.

2) (I'm referring to OS 10.3 here) Tweak the OS to use as little juice as possible and have the fewest background processes. try the following:
- under display preferences set the colors to thousands or 256 colors instead of millions
- turn off all of the universal access options
- turn off expose and hot corners
- under system prefs > accounts click the startup items tab and remove all items
- turn off speech synthesis and system sounds
- turn off sharing if you don't need it

See the pattern here? Anything you don't need to run pro tools should be disabled.

3) Restart before opening PT if you've been doing other crap with your laptop beforehand

4) don't run ANY OTHER applications while using PT. Norton antivirus auto-protect most certainly should be disabled. Go to Activity Monitor under utilities and quit processes if necessary.

5) After making your selection for bouncing, close either the mix or edit window and minimize the other. THEN you can select bounce to disk. This is a biggie. Also make sure that you select 'convert after bounce'.

This should help! Enjoy!

[mikeyc]

OK, so I'm doing a session tonight. The band wants to send MIDI info from a pre-programmed drum track into PT on separate tracks. How do I do this? I don't tend to use the MIDI functions of PT so much. By the way, I'm running a 002r & PT 6.4.
Thanks for any info duders.