DAE ERROR FIRST IN A YEAR?!?!

[asylum]

GREAT IF ANYONE CAN GIVE ME ADVICE WITH THIS, I,VE TRIED EVERYTHING!
I THINK, SUDDENLY PRO TOOLS 6.4 IS TELLING IT CANT SEND AUDIO FAST ENOUGH TO THE DRIVES, TRY LOSING SOME TRACKS... I,M ONLY RECORDING 12!?
ITS A DUEL 1.5 MAC G4 1G RAM, THE PCI USAGE HAS GONE WAY UP... SUDDENLY... COULD THIS MEAN SOMETHING SERIOUS IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN WITH THE DRIVE!??!
ANY HELP OR TIPS

[allencollins]

Originally Posted by asylum

GREAT IF ANYONE CAN GIVE ME ADVICE WITH THIS, I,VE TRIED EVERYTHING!
I THINK, SUDDENLY PRO TOOLS 6.4 IS TELLING IT CANT SEND AUDIO FAST ENOUGH TO THE DRIVES, TRY LOSING SOME TRACKS... I,M ONLY RECORDING 12!?
ITS A DUEL 1.5 MAC G4 1G RAM, THE PCI USAGE HAS GONE WAY UP... SUDDENLY... COULD THIS MEAN SOMETHING SERIOUS IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN WITH THE DRIVE!??!
ANY HELP OR TIPS

Well first check the fragmentation. Also as drives fill up their performance decreases. Generally when a hard drive is first written to, the read-write arm is located at the center of the platter. As the disk fills with data, the read-write arm moves to the outside of the platter. In other words the radius the arm has to travel becomes larger. Similar to how a CDR laser travels as it records. The more files on the disk the larger the radius and the slower the seek/access time becomes.

Try defragging. If you are up in the 60% of capacity delete some old files and defrag again

For a pro setup SCSI drives are still essential. You need to have a good bus mastering adapter that supports full duplex i/o. Also for a spindle speed , 10k or greater is essential.

Sata drives are nice but they still are not realible enough for a DAW. I don't believe any SATA controllers offer busmastering w/ full duplex

I use an Adaptec ULTRA 320. Most of my drives are 15k with an 8 meg buffer. Ive done a little over 250 tracks
@ 96/24 with nuendo. Never had an issue. My cpu never hit more than 40%. I'm on a pc too though

the cool thing about a bus mastering controller is all disk read/write instructions are done on the controller level which means your CPU doesn't have to do it. It really frees up your CPU for other stuff like FX processing and
MIDI. The controller card has its own CPU.

[aussie_techie]

reformat your audio drive, dont defrag
you are using a dedicated audio drive arnt you? you cant expect ant decent track count if you are recording to the system drive.
and for god sake stop shouting

[catfish11]

sorry scsi drives are not essential, period, unless you feel like dropping 1000.00 for 30 gigs, or whatever it costs

download onyx run it, run the apple disk utility, repair permissions

as said audio should be on a seperate drive, a firewire drive should be good for at least 24 tracks, i prefer internal drives if you have an extra pci slot get a sata card, if you want, however, I run regular ata drives and can easily get 50-60 tracks, no problem @ 24/48
you can fit 4 in a G4

also I defrag all the time, I have never had a problem
some say not to

make sure you are allowing OSX to do its maintenence thing
oynx (free) will do it, disk warrior, drive genius is very good for checking your drives, it is worth the money, believe me

also trash digi preferences, if using protools, there is a bunch of stuff to do, go to the digi site and search

and please DON"T SHOUT!!!!

[ShamansDream]

Digi guarantees, with a qualified setup, to record 32 tracks at the highest samplerate your hardware can handle through firewire with the oxford 911 chipset.

Since your PCI usage is way up, you must be running an OO1. Have you changed anything on your PCI bus? My OO1 in a PC runs at just under 40%. Maybe something like a virus or other peripheral has taken priority? Have you changed the OO1 card's PCI slots recently?

You also need to check your DAE Hardware buffer setting. If this is not at "2 Default" you will get that error message. RARELY would you want to change this setting. Some people have changed this an forgoten about it only to have problems like you are having now.

And yes, make sure your drive is clean and efficient. It may even be that your hard disk driver has been updated or corrupted. First try a clean dedicated audio drive (not a partition on the OS Drive!) and if that doesn't fix anything, clean up your OS.

[asylum]

thanks all, thats i'll follow up all this...

[5down1up]

happens from time 2 time . just press play and everything should be fine . i am running 64 tracks from a firewire drive without a prob @ 44.1/24 .

[allencollins]

Originally Posted by catfish11

sorry scsi drives are not essential, period, unless you feel like dropping 1000.00 for 30 gigs, or whatever it costs

If you just do home recording for 'fun' and 'recreation' then maybe you don't need SCSI. If you have a studio that you need realiablity and pro performance you need scsi. 'period' as you say

I always thought it was wierd that people buy $3000 pres $4000 mics and they use a stock Maxtor harddrive that costs $50 when hard drives are attributable to atleast 50% of DAW's performance problems

With hard disks you get what you pay for. The first time you lose a clients data during a session youll wish you had a SCSI raid system

Running a pro DAW without a SCSI RAID is plain ignorant and very unprofessional.
Any serious workstaTion has SCSI. Even high end Dell's and Gateways come stock with SCSI still.

I know apple doesn't since they are still marketing their pc's for 'home' use

[5down1up]

when u say so ... then it is that way