pro tools and external hard drive

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Member Since: Jan 06, 2008

helloooo i just got a glyph 050 250 gb hard drive so pro tools will function properly (not crash) and well it still crashes even with me running the audio files on the external hd. i set the work space for the hd to R|R and the system drive to P|P

please help this sucks a lot ahhhhhhh

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Eat Spam before it eats YOU!!!
Member
Since: May 11, 2002


Mar 31, 2008 09:18 pm

any error messages?

Member
Since: Jan 06, 2008


Apr 01, 2008 12:20 am

yes the error is "You have run out of CPU power. Remove some RTAS plug ins or increase the CPU usage limit in the playback engine dialog (-9128)

i was under the impression these types of messages wouldnt come up anymore with an external hard drive (i increased the cpu usage limit also)

Member
Since: Mar 03, 2008


Apr 01, 2008 12:58 am

CPU power has nothing to do with hard drive and buffer underrun errors. How many tracks? What are your system specs? Which version of ProTools?(LE?)

Member
Since: Jan 06, 2008


Apr 01, 2008 03:31 pm

macbook pro
1 ghz ram

pro tools LE 7.3

3-4 tracks

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006


Apr 01, 2008 04:20 pm

When mixing it is safe to increase the CPU usage (buffers) to maximum. An external hard drive can help as you are recording to a different drive than the application runs from, it will not however help with your CPU usage issue.

There are some heavy hitting plugs in the form of echo, reverb and delay for starters and they will kill a slow system where EQ and compression is usually pretty light on the CPU. The only way to icrease your ability is a faster processor or an add-on FX processing card. Sadly, these are usually PCI or PCIE and I know of nothing for laptops (have not really looked though).

Last but not least, you could apply FX to one track at a time until you like it, then lock it (not sure what this is called in PT). It basically saves a new wav file with the FX applied and therefore leaves your CPU to do other things.

Hope that helps.

Member
Since: Mar 03, 2008


Apr 01, 2008 04:53 pm

Looking at your specs and the error message, it may be that OS X has put a CPU usage cap on ProTools. I don't run Leopard so I'm not sure how this might be changed. I thought that the feature was done away with in OS 9 but I guess I was wrong. Your Mac is plenty fast enough. I would head over to macmusic.com and try the forums there. Those guys have all this stuff figured out.

Eat Spam before it eats YOU!!!
Member
Since: May 11, 2002


Apr 01, 2008 05:12 pm

There are only a couple solutions... this is actually the same problem that turned me off protools about 10 years ago..

1.. Increase CPU usage limit -- this is finite...sooner or later you'll still run out of processing power

2. Increase hardware buffer size - infinite but adds latency... which can mess up midi automation and ... is well... latency.

3. Do the 'bounce and lock' method... usually requires 2 copies of each track.. the working copy and the bounced one which you use when you're not working on it. This is probably the best solution unless you can't even play one track...

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