Pro Tools Express = RAM Issue? Please help new to site

J

Jake9812

New member
Hey everyone,

I know you have seen I million of these threads, and trust me I have read through about a million myself trying to find an answer to my problem.

I watched all the youtube videos and read articles on how to help the performance of pro tools. I recently have been getting those annoying messages about cache full and CPU blah blah blah, and of course everything I have tried has not helped.

The weird thing is this: Sometimes pro tools works extremely well. I have a mix with about 15 tracks, including sends, aux, plugins, etc. Typically works great! Now I'm working on a new song, add a few tracks and a few plugins and then have a ton of issues.

Here are as many specs as I can remember you ask for to assess the problem. Also if there is an easy way or program that I can run to show what the heck is going on with my RAM or CPU, that would be great!

Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30 GHz
RAM: 8GB
64-bit OS
Hard Drive 1TB
Using ProTools Express with the Avid M-Box Gen 3 (USB)

Thanks to anyone who can help! I feel like 8 GB of RAM should be doing the trick, but when I check the Task Manager (while using only pro tools) it sometimes runs at 50% CPU when its just sitting there. That seems weird considering i have 8 GB.

Any thoughts?
 
Hey,
That's a pretty powerful machine; Certainly more powerful than what I'm running and I have no PT issues at all.

I know PT9 has a built in activity monitor. I can't remember the exact menu it's under but it should be very easy to find.
Maybe that'll shed some light?
 
Thanks! Alright so mine looks a little different (probably because its PTExpress) My system usage has only three bars : CPU (native) CPU (Clip) and Disk. The last two are completely at 0, however the CPU (Native) is jumping around like crazy between 44% all the way up to 80%. This is happening when I'm not even running anything besides PT and google chrome to respond to you. Any idea why my CPU would be acting so weird when PT is up?
 
Jake9812 said:
Thanks! Alright so mine looks a little different (probably because its PTExpress) My system usage has only three bars : CPU (native) CPU (Clip) and Disk.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's normal. I think that screenshot might have been PT HD or something.

Jake9812 said:
The last two are completely at 0, however the CPU (Native) is jumping around like crazy between 44% all the way up to 80%. This is happening when I'm not even running anything besides PT and google chrome to respond to you. Any idea why my CPU would be acting so weird when PT is up?
Click to expand...

Strange indeed.
Is the computer in good shape asides from the PT situation?

Are you recording to the internal drive or an external?
 
Just thinking out loud. You said it could be fine in a reasonably busy session, then no nice in a new one?
Is there any chance the buffer settings are different betweens sessions? I don't remember if PT saves that info per session or not, but it's worth checking.

Also, it's not uncommon for PT to just lie and claim CPU usage when the problem is actually with IO.
Internal or external hard drive? Regardless of the answer, try the opposite.
 
Steenamaroo said:
Strange indeed.
Is the computer in good shape asides from the PT situation?

Are you recording to the internal drive or an external?
Click to expand...

Besides PT, everything else is smooth. When I run demanding programs I try to keep the performance/quality ratio fairly reasonable, but only pro tools has been messing with me.

All of my sounds are saved to my C drive (which also runs PT). I read about trying to keep the sound files seperate from the driving running pt (and the OS).
 
I've never had issues putting sessions on the system drive, but digi/avid have always recommended a second drive.
It'd be worth trying that to rule it out if nothing else.
 
Steenamaroo said:
Just thinking out loud. You said it could be fine in a reasonably busy session, then no nice in a new one?
Is there any chance the buffer settings are different betweens sessions? I don't remember if PT saves that info per session or not, but it's worth checking.

Also, it's not uncommon for PT to just lie and claim CPU usage when the problem is actually with IO.
Internal or external hard drive? Regardless of the answer, try the opposite.
Click to expand...

I double checked two session (one with problems and one without). Both have the same playback engine settings. I just reopened the system usage monitor in the mix with the problems. For about 5 minutes the CPU Native was down to 6% and up to about 8% during playback! But within those few minutes, the activity monitor began acting up like before and I'm getting those error messages again. Incredibly weird how it can run so smooth and then change within minutes!

I also make sure to consolidate the music files (I hear not doing this can cause a slowdown).
 
Steenamaroo said:
I've never had issues putting sessions on the system drive, but digi/avid have always recommended a second drive.
It'd be worth trying that to rule it out if nothing else.
Click to expand...

Sounds good, do I just need to move the mix files to the different drive and then try running it that way?
 
Yeah, every session is contained within a folder of the same name.
Just move the whole folder.

Here's another one to try first - Set the no of cores in use to 3 instead of 4, and set cpu % to 95 instead of 99.
 
Steenamaroo said:
Here's another one to try first - Set the no of cores in use to 3 instead of 4, and set cpu % to 95 instead of 99.
Click to expand...

No luck man. I just tried changing those settings and also moved the files to an external. No matter the settings, as soon as I hit the playback button, and then wait 1 minute, the CPU starts acting up (i did some testing to see what is causing it to start acting up). Sorry I'm little help to my own problem but I appreciate the help so far!
 
Thanks for the help! I will for sure wipe it clear of my computer and then just re-install everything clean.

For the most part, pro tools has been working very well. I've only had my set up for about a year and work on it only few times a month (full time student and been busy). But when I have used it, everything seemed fine. Like I mentioned, I had a mix going that I had worked on for a while and it had somewhere around 12 tracks with a variety of plugins. That would sometimes get a little sloppy with the CPU, but I would just turn off one or two plugins and it was fine. Now I'm getting the messages out of nowhere.

The ONLY thing I have recently done differently was download the expansion from the avid site that includes some digital instruments. Forgot to download those in the beginning. However, I always deactivate them when not needed to preserve CPU space, so I don't think THAT is the reason my CPU is getting burned out. I've also been trying to download various free DATS (which I"m starting to realize I need to go out and buy a VST to RTAS converter).

Thanks for your help though, I will update the forum later about how the uninstall/reinstall goes.
 
The instrument pack, from memory, includes xpand, boom, structure free and mini grand.
They can be quite CPU intensive but if they're not in use in a session they won't have any effect on performance.

I doubt this is the answer but look for anything that's unique to your troublesome sessions.
If there is a particular plugin or instrument in use causing the issue it'd be good.

Perhaps you have elastic audio turned on in the problematic session? Something like that?
 
Update:

Uninstalled pro tools completely and re-installed. Tried the same project with problems, and it continued to have problems. Then i tried opening up one of those template projects that PT comes with, and i selected the composer-guitar one just to see how that would work. I put in some midi files i had and ran a piano and a drum midi with both instruments playing and a bunch of sends going. No problems. SOOOOO i'm really starting to think that something is just screwy with the project i was working on. I stripped it down (even though it didn't have many faders or sends) to one audio file playing a piano part, one piano verb aux, and a master fader. I have a few plugins running with a bus send to the verb channel. Been doing some eq'ing while playing the track on a loop. ZERO problems.

The track I got rid of was a vocal track that had mild compression and basic eq. I'm really starting to think that PT simply hated my vocal track and decided to get all mad every time it had to hear it (it wasn't a good track) ;)

But in all seriousness, I have no idea why its working. CPU is around 5% at idle and jumps to 8% with playback. With the track I deleted still in the mix, same CPU at idle but would JUMP like crazy after playback started and even after playback stopped. Even had to do a force shut down on my entire computer today.

I'm going to continue to play around with stuff throughout the next week. I tried to put the same inserts that were on that vocal track on different tracks, just to see if the plugins were messing it up, but nothing seemed weird there.

Probably has nothing to do with it: For the vocal track, i was trying to set it up to do what I believe is called comp recording on a loop. I created playlists but could not figure out exactly how to do it. THAT is the only major difference the vocal track had compared to the other tracks. MAYBE i screwed something up when trying to do the playlist comp recording, or maybe it had nothing to do with it.
 
Wow. A result. Nice one. :)

Pure speculation but I'd be running some chkdsk utilities or something incase your hard drive is showing early symptoms of failure.
I mean, mistakes and glitches can happen for sure, but it sounds like maybe PT was having trouble getting that particular bit of audio from the drive for whatever reason.

Sorry I didn't really help in the end, but I'm glad you got a result.
 
Well although neither of us could pinpoint the problem, its always nice to be able to talk it through with someone who knows more about PT then I do. Thanks for the suggestions and I'll look into the chkdsk utilities. Any suggestions which one to use? Or does the chkdsk work just fine right in cmd.exe?
 
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