"DAE cannot get audio from the drive fast enough"

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Drake Speedball
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"DAE cannot get audio from the drive fast enough"

Post by Drake Speedball » Wed Jan 17, 2007 5:15 pm

Hello, again.

I am having trouble with PT LE 6.4 (XP, Mbox1).

I am trying to access some old sessions, but when I try to play them, I get a message stating the the "DAE cannot get audio from the drive fast enough" or something to that effect. I already defragmented the drive (which was fragmented all to Hell - I check to drive every month or so, and this last month really did a number on it.)

Anyway, I defragmented but I still get the same message. The sessions look ok, the waveforms are there, etc, but it just won't play. I tried messing with my buffer settings and all that, but no dice.

BTW, this is a dedicated machine with the exception of the stupid itunes I had to install for my new ipod (this is the only XP machine I have.)

Am I doomed?

Any help would be appreciated.

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syrupcore
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Post by syrupcore » Sat Jan 20, 2007 5:03 pm

do you have software (anti virus, system tray 'helpers) running in the background? Google 'xp background processes' to figure out what you need and how to dump the rest.

is this all on one drive? you might have better luck installing a second drive and putting all of your audio on there.

sometimes 'reseting' the dae engine helps. open it up and set it to 64ms and the highest buffer (8 I think) and exit pro tools. open it up again and set it back to normal (1024 is fine for mixing) and set the buffer back to 2 or whatever the default is. close protools and launch again. this helps 1 out of 34 times...

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Drake Speedball
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Post by Drake Speedball » Sat Jan 20, 2007 5:57 pm

syrupcore,

Thanks for your reply. The machine doesn't have any 3rd party anti-virus stuff installed...the system tray is pretty clean as I have tried to keep clutter to a minimum on this machine.

I've had this setup for about two years without incident (until recently, of course.) I have made, however, the cardinal mistake of recording audio to the main drive. I keep intending to get an external or other second drive for audio, but I figured that the PC crash bug couldn't touch me :roll:

Everything was cool until I tried to install some USB 2.0 ports on the machine. When I tried to install the drivers, I got a message stating that I needed XP service pack 1 to proceed. I tried downloading them and installing them several times but got Product ID error messages. I went so far as to order a service pack 2 cd from microsoft, but to no avail. A seperate issue, I know, but I think maybe all those failed install attempts might have jacked up my machine.

I have ditched the prefs file, as well as playing with the buffer settings.

The thing is, I can usually get away with running the more recent projects. This issue popped up when I was trying to play back some old sessions (almost two years old.) Maybe the old data got so convoluted that even defrag couldn't help.

Anyway, I'll keep messing with stuff. Thanks for your help!

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Post by joel hamilton » Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:53 pm

I have had good luck with "option>shift>3" [consolidate selection] in cases like this. Write new files before you even hit play, then hit play and see if it works.

Also "apple>shift>U" "select unused" in the regions bin, and remove or delete them from the session. PT still buffers those files for use, so it really pounds on the drive and RAM to even have references to them laying around in the regions bin.

Clear out everything but what you need, do a save as, consolidate all the files, and try again.

Thats what I would do. Oh, clear the unused regions AFTER you consolidate, so you get rid of all the old chunks laying around.

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Post by GooberNumber9 » Tue Jan 23, 2007 10:32 pm

I solved this problem for myself on a FAT32 drive by (you're not going to like it):

- Copy all the sessions from the drive
- Reformat the drive NTFS
- Copy the sessions back
- Enjoy

Sucks, yeah. If your drive is formatted FAT32 I would highly recommend this. If not to solve your current problem, then at some point in the future.

If you want to have a drive that you can mount read-write on both Macs and PCs... well, I haven't found the best way to do that yet. I haven't totally tried HFS+ on XP with MacDrive and PT 7.3 yet. Supposedly that works, but I'll believe it when I've recorded, edited and mixed it.

Todd Wilcox

PS: I haven't found any benefit to defragmenting NTFS drives on any system (audio, mail servers, databases, workstations, anything). If you are using NTFS, or if you switch to it, don't worry about defragging. MS didn't even have an NTFS defrag utility until XP. Some thought they were lazy about it, but it's really because you don't need it.

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Post by @?,*???&? » Wed Jan 24, 2007 1:22 pm

The biggest rookie audio recording mistake is the lack of a 2nd drive as an exclusive data drive. You should be running 2 drives- one with the main program and your computers operating system and the other should be exclusively for your sessions and audio drives.

Are you only running one drive? What is is rated rpm-wise? Audio drives must be 7200 rpm or faster.

As well, how the drive is formatted can seriously affect how quick audio can be handled from it.

If it's a PC, is the drive formatted for Fat32? If not, get all that data on to another drive and re-format it as such.

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Drake Speedball
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Post by Drake Speedball » Thu Jan 25, 2007 6:01 am

yeah, it's just the one drive. Don't know the speed - I assume my buddy that built it probably just got the most gigs for the money....I will be getting a dedicated drive soon, though!

The problem is not evident anymore in my newer sessions. When I navigate around the directory to older sessions, however, the session file name is in blue (instead of the usual black.) I guess these are the sessions that are jacked up.

BTW, should I go for an internal drive, or should I do external firewire? I've heard of this problem being exacerbated with firewire drives...


Thanks for all the help!

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Kitana_One
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Post by Kitana_One » Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:21 am

40percentrobot wrote:yeah, it's just the one drive. Don't know the speed - I assume my buddy that built it probably just got the most gigs for the money....I will be getting a dedicated drive soon, though!

The problem is not evident anymore in my newer sessions. When I navigate around the directory to older sessions, however, the session file name is in blue (instead of the usual black.) I guess these are the sessions that are jacked up.

BTW, should I go for an internal drive, or should I do external firewire? I've heard of this problem being exacerbated with firewire drives...


Thanks for all the help!
A secondary disk dedicated to your audio projects should be mandatory with PT.

I recommend using an internal SATA for your projects. Then get an external Firewire drive to back up everything to.

And when you can afford it,... get another firewire drive and internal SATA to duplicate the originals and the other backup.

After that... get a DVD burner and a huge spindle of blank dvd's.

Never underestimate Murphy's Law and the value of taking time and dumping money into a good archival system until you lose a huge chunk of data and your beloved hard worked projects.






Something you may want to do...

Try and keep all the audio files for your session in one place, ie: a folder for each song, all containing their respective audio files and such. There's a reason Pro Tools creates it's files in such a way.

If you import audio samples into a session, be sure to copy the audio to the project folder. There's a little check box you can select when importing audio to a track. It may take up more hard drive real estate.. but it's worth it to have your projects organised better.

Once your projects are organised better, the sessions will run smoother as well, instead of the hard drive having to search all over the place to try and find the data it needs.
Last edited by Kitana_One on Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

GooberNumber9
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Post by GooberNumber9 » Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:28 pm

40percentrobot wrote:The problem is not evident anymore in my newer sessions. When I navigate around the directory to older sessions, however, the session file name is in blue (instead of the usual black.) I guess these are the sessions that are jacked up.
That's your problem right there!
Those file names aren't blue randomly, it means those files are compressed! That means every time audio is coming out of those files it is being uncompressed by the processor in real time. FIRE bad.

You should be able to right-click on them, choose properties, and then uncheck "Compress these files to save space". You might have to click on the advanced button. Then it will begin a possibly lengthy process of un-compressing and you should be fine after that completes.

Todd Wilcox

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Drake Speedball
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Post by Drake Speedball » Fri Jan 26, 2007 10:24 am

Dear Todd,

You are my new favorite human.

I shall do as instructed and report back on my findings.

Thanks, everyone!!

GooberNumber9
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Post by GooberNumber9 » Mon Jan 29, 2007 7:37 pm

40percentrobot wrote:You are my new favorite human.
Spoken like a real animal lover. Or possibly Cylon Raider.

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Snarky
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Post by Snarky » Wed Feb 07, 2007 5:04 pm

Dude, I am having the exact same problem except with a Mac G5. I run one seperate drive for my OS, and two other seperate drives for data only. The problem just started recently. I always back up data on an external FW drive. I am running PT LE 6.4 on a 002rack, and the Mac OS is 10.3.4.
The OS I am running is supposed to magically defrag, but I will try to install a new utility if anyone can recomend one. It is very annoying. Everything will run great until I TRY TO BOUNCE. I am going to "bounce" this fucking thing off my knee into the Scioto river if I dont figure this out soon, nothing is more annoying than having a client sit there and be hapy with a mix, and then when you try to bounce it freaks out. HELP!!!
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Snarky
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Post by Snarky » Wed Feb 07, 2007 5:24 pm

joel hamilton wrote:I have had good luck with "option>shift>3" [consolidate selection] in cases like this. Write new files before you even hit play, then hit play and see if it works.

Also "apple>shift>U" "select unused" in the regions bin, and remove or delete them from the session. PT still buffers those files for use, so it really pounds on the drive and RAM to even have references to them laying around in the regions bin.
Clear out everything but what you need, do a save as, consolidate all the files, and try again.

Thats what I would do. Oh, clear the unused regions AFTER you consolidate, so you get rid of all the old chunks laying around.

This could be my problem. I have a bazillion gigs of that crap lying around, this makes sense. I'll let you guys know how it goes.
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"this rizz in the foldback is bollocks mate."

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