Wish I'd known about this subforum before SL & 8.0.3pr upgrade

[GKevinK]

I've been holding off upgrading to Snow Leopard, hoping that I'd see the regular release of a fully supported PT LE 8 version... but after a month of checking the digi website thought to myself "it can't be that far off now" and did the upgrade (SL, then 8.0.3pr).

PT is now unusable for me, with the buffer underrun error (-6085) on playback. It was working perfectly fine in 8.0.1 on 10.5.8 before the upgrade (which makes me suspicious of all the accounts of this or that hardware connection compatibility like the presence of firewire drives, or the freakin' Mbox 2 Pro being powered from the wall wart).

I did make a system disk bootable image backup, but now even booting back into 10.5.8 and running the 8.0.1 version from there exhibits the same error. I've been careful to not save any of the projects I tried opening (which are stored on an internal non-system SATA drive). As a result, I'm not confident that even if I restored my 10.5.8 backup (throwing away the SL install) that it'd do me any good. I'm guessing that it's probably still my best chance of recovering any use of PT. The description of the prerelease led me to believe that it was mostly working... and this is clearly not the case for many people.

My eyes are now opened to just how far behind Digi upgrades run, and what level of quality to expect from 'prerelease' anything from them. I will not be tempted again. If I'm going to continue using this stuff I probably have to consider getting a separate computer that can be kept 6 - 12 months behind the current operating system version.

[SCM]

.....My eyes are now opened to just how far behind Digi upgrades run .....

Embarrassing revealing. But good to know.
Maybe some old PT users will think about changing the DAW and
maybe new potential buyers will be put off.

It´s sad to get no infos from Digi, no working updates and -if they will be sometime available,
they are not on the newest technical status. (e.g. 64Bit...)

Could be better

[rullian]

Digi: is it too much to ask for at least some sort of update on snow leopard compatibility? is it weeks/months away?

[Keybeeetsss]

Besides MEAT, I'd bet that its safe to say that u guys are very or somewhat new to PT...Old users know the when/how DIGI works which is in the most part safe & its been that way...

[DigiTechSupt]

(which makes me suspicious of all the accounts of this or that hardware connection compatibility like the presence of firewire drives, or the freakin' Mbox 2 Pro being powered from the wall wart).

Were you powering the Mbox 2 Pro with the power supply? If so, that definitely can cause 6085's - and they can be intermittent (showing up one day and not the next, or one version and not another).

And, to put it bluntly, the things you are 'suspicious' of are exactly those things we have years of data from calls, DUC posts and engineering investigations. They are posted because they work, not because we like to throw things out there willy-nilly.

A 6085 error is not due to the 8.0.3PR release - it's a firewire communication issue and not a bug in the software. This I can say with absolute confidence.

[GKevinK]

Were you powering the Mbox 2 Pro with the power supply? If so, that definitely can cause 6085's - and they can be intermittent (showing up one day and not the next, or one version and not another).

I'd been using it that way (without issue) with LE 8.0.1 and Leopard 10.5.8. I read about the power supply being a common fix, but connected or not didn't change the error for me in the iterations I attempted.


And, to put it bluntly, the things you are 'suspicious' of are exactly those things we have years of data from calls, DUC posts and engineering investigations. They are posted because they work, not because we like to throw things out there willy-nilly.

A 6085 error is not due to the 8.0.3PR release - it's a firewire communication issue and not a bug in the software. This I can say with absolute confidence.

Ok, thanks... sorry if I was venting my frustration at having apparently trashed my working setup by 'upgrading'. My frustration was probably elevated by the fact that my most recent project happened to be using PT to pitch-shift the soundtrack of a video (a feature that I was psyched to see existed), and a dialog box came up saying something to the effect that video tracks were not supported and tracks would be disabled or removed or something (leading me to wonder if features were being removed in this 'upgrade'.)

So, firewire then. Am I to understand that that only thing that can be using *any* firewire connections during a PT session is the MBox 2 Pro itself? If true, hopefully this is a temporary situation.

[stustan]

I do hope it all works out...I think it will. But like I said I am no techie but on my system the Mbox2 Pro is plugged into the front firewire port, no other drives are connected to the rear of the Mbox 2 Pro. All firewire 400 drives are daisy chained to the Macs rear firewire 400 port. My Canopus is connected to the firewire 400 port on the added firewire card and all firewire 800 drives are daisy chained to the two firewire 800 ports on the added firewire card, the added card has one firewire 400 and two fire wire 800 ports. Whew. I hope this helps and as a word of encouragement my system is extremely stable. I am a sound editor, not a composer or musician, so I do not use VI's, midi, tons of plugins...with that being said this was the only problem I have ever had. Honestly my system has not crashed once in years and it is used heavily almost every day. Good Luck
__________________
Mac Pro Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 6 Gigs Ram, 250 Gig Internal Dual Boot, OSX 10.6.1, 2nd Firewire Card
Canopus ADVC-110, HF289h 28" Monitors 2x, Sony Trinitron for QT Playback
PTLE 8.0.3PR, Mbox 2 Pro Factory, DV Toolkit 2, Command 8, Wacom Intuos 4
Mackie HR824, Miniminer, Lacie D2 Quadra External Drives



I installed the SIIG 2-Port PCIe NN-E20012-S2 dual port FW400 host buss adapter and my MBox2 Pro worked with 8.0.3PR. No more -6085 errors at all, plays fine.

The new SIIG FW400 buss only has the MBox2 Pro on it (port 1)(Note the MBox2 Pro is being powered from the SIIG FW400 port power only - READ no transformer/brick).

The Mac Pro rear FW800 port has the 3 external LaCie HD FW800 drives all daisy chained to it.

The Mac Pro rear FW400 has the FW400 cable from my first 23" Cinema Display plugged into it and the first 23" Cinema Dislplay has my iSight camera plugged in the FW 400 port on the first 23" Cinema Display.

I may try to plug the 2nd FW400 cable from my second 23" Cinema Display into the second FW400 port on new SIIG FW400 buss (although since things are working I may leave well enough alone).

Thank you to everyone their help and encouragement. If you have any advise on learning PRLE 8 for voice recording/editing (voice over), please feel free to share with a total novice.

Best & Thanks!

Al
__________________
MacPro 1,1 2 x 3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Model Snow Leopard 10.6.1
4 GB 667 Mhz DDR2
2 Super Drives Pioneer DVD-111D
2 23" Cinema Displays w/ATI Radeon X1900XT
4 x 1TB Internal SATA ST31000340AS 7200 RPM HD Journaled HFS+
MBox2 Pro Model 0xA9 <-> FW400 Front FW400 Port - Pro Tools LE 8.0.3
2 LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 1.5TB FW800 <-> FW800 Port
1 LaCie D2 Big Disk Extreme 1.0TB FW800 <-> Rear FW800 Port
DBX 286A Mic Preamp/Proc
EV RE27 N/D Mic
Sonamp 260 JBL Control 28

Need Help with 8.0.3pr on 10.6.1

Check out the thread a few threads down, see if it helps

[GKevinK]

Ok, just fired off an order for the SIIG FW card - we'll see if that makes any difference. Thanks.

[GKevinK]

UPDATE!

Ok, here's what I did. I received the SIIG 2 port FW400 card today, and set about to installation. I discovered quickly that the inside of my Mac Pro didn't have any of the standard power Molex connections to supply power to the PCIe card per the instructions. I fussed about and eventually (with help from the tech support folks at Other World Computing macsales.com) determined that there was an adapter cable that I could order to use the 2x3 socket on the motherboard that is normally expected to provide extra power to video cards.

In the meantime, though, I just installed the FW400 card without the internal power connection. Concerned about either not having FW buss power or overloading whatever might be drawn through the PCIe slot itself, I left my MBox 2 Pro connected to it's own power supply. The System Profiler now shows that the MBox 2 Pro is the only device on that firewire buss.

Bringing up my PT session, I did still get the dialog box stating "Some tracks were dropped because Video tracks are not supported by this version of Pro Tools" ('sup wit dat???) BUT other than complaining the session seems to play back just fine now. (!) I haven't tried to do anything further like bouncing it back out to quicktime again... but otherwise I appear to be back in gear. :)

[GKevinK]

Well... bouncing to Quicktime failed at the end, but at least I'm getting further.