Hello, Steenamaroo and now, guitargirl7. I sincerely hope all is well with you two. It is interesting to find that I am not the only musician to experience a little (well, okay, a lot of) frustration with the pro tools se program. It makes me feel a little less inadequate when it comes to technology.
Yes, it's been trying. The AVID contact # 650-731-6100 and is on their website under support. When you call, they will ask for a case # which you will get when you register your device (In my case the m-audio audio interface). Once you have that, they will allow you to call the # on the website. Or, they can register your device on the phone at the same number, just follow the phone prompts. Unfortunately, they will have you do about 20 modifications to your computer, trying to get the software to work properly. I finally told the guy, look, surely you don't expect all your customers to go through all these procedures, in order to lay down a few simple tracks. One tech agreed and promised a new software program. I have yet to see it. They send a follow up email that you can respond to. The last thing they recommended to me was to make sure that I had connected to a 2.0 USB instead of a 3.0 USB. So, of course it worked fine for 1-2 tracks, I hangup the phone, and suddenly start getting that old static noise. But...........I found that when I encounter error codes or the white noise, if I save and close the session, when I reopen it, it is fine. So, whenever I run across the error codes or noise, I just save, close, and reopen. It seems to work well so far. Pain in the ass, but it works.
So, after trying three differrent laptops, downloading the updated m-audio driver about, oh I don't know maybe 15 different times, the pro tools se program about 15 times, doing about 20 modifications to the laptops, including logging on as administrator, upgrade graphic driver, update adaptive drivers, disable turbo boost, adjust powerization, optimize hard disk, and adjust processor scheduling
I'm thinking that absolutely none of those things were necessary. The new duo processor laptops (i5 or i7) can easily handle audio recording. But I have concluded that the pro tools se program is just simply inferior to higher models from pro tools and more hassle than many other software programs out there. For the time being, mine is working. But if I should continue to have problems, I'm gonna throw in the towel and try another software program. Too much hassle. I'm a musician, not a computer techie.
But in the end, I think I am experiencing that learning curve that everyone must go through in doing something new on the computer. I know that I have much still to learn about how to use the features on the program.
Good luck guitargirl7 and hey Steenamaroo, thanks for hanging in there with me while I worked out the kinks on this new venture. Take care you two and let me know how things are. I'm not a facebook kinda guy but I enjoy hearing from you.