Mbox and intel mac cpu issue?

studio23

...Uh?...
I just recently picked up an original Mbox to try out Pro Tools. I am running 7.4 on an Intel iMac w/ 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11. The issue I am having is that as soon as I start recording, I get the "CPU usage is holding off USB audio. Remove some plug-ins, delete some tracks, or increase the 'H/W Buffer Size' in the Playback Engine dialog. (-9136)." This happens when recording even 1 track with no plugins, after between 1-30 seconds of recording. The interesting thing is that the activity monitor only shows about 5-10% CPU usage. I have enlarged the HW buffer to the largest setting, but it has made no difference. I also tried on my intel macbook and had the same issue. Anybody else ran into this problem?
 
Is your mbox plugged in to the front panel USB port on your system?

The iMac does not have any USB ports on the front. On the macbook, I have it plugged into the port on the left side closest to the front of the laptop, as reccomended on Digidesign's support page
 
Are you using an external firewire drive is so, which type (400, 800... brand, etc) and (if so) which FW port are you connecting it to?
 
Are you using an external firewire drive is so, which type (400, 800... brand, etc) and (if so) which FW port are you connecting it to?

I'm actually not using one right now. I know it would be ideal, but I am just trying out protools for the time being and didn't want to invest too much in it if I didn't like it. Would using the system drive really not even allow me to record 10 seconds of a single track??
 
It may work, but it is not supported. There are very specific requirements for Hards drives to run PT.

Hard Drive Requirements

Recording to the system startup drive is not recommended or supported.

Although limited recording and playback of audio tracks may be possible using the startup drive, one or more separate 7200 rpm or faster hard drive or drives dedicated for audio is required for maximum performance and track count.

Pro Tools does not support RAID technology. Please do not activate this feature on any Pro Tools recording drives.

Although you may be able to use USB 2.0 hard drives for record and playback, they are not able to achieve maximum track count compared to FireWire drives, and are therefore not supported

FireWire 800 drives are not supported for record and playback with Mbox 2 Pro systems



http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=54&langid=100&categoryid=35&itemid=23158

[Theres a link to this page in the link above] More detailed info on hard drive requirements for Pro tools LE on Mac OS X

http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&navid=54&itemid=23142


You can use an external drive for things apart from PT, so you wouldn't be wasting your money if you bought one. However if you do buy one, it must have the oxford 9XX chipset on the firewire controller of the external case.
 
Sorry to bump this again. I bought a Maxtor firewire 400 drive with the oxford 911 chipset, and I still have the same thing happening. (Yes, I disabled recording on the system drive and enabled it on the firewire.) I contacted digidesign's techniical support, and they suggested updating firmware on the mbox and deleting the protools databases. I did that as well...no change. The iMac can record one track for about 4 minutes before getting the error; the macbook can record for about 2 seconds. Any other suggestions?
 
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