After saying I had no problems with 10.2 last night on the podcast, I suffered a number of 9129 errors during the editing and post production of the show. Also I mentioned the problems Mike Aiton was having with 10.2 and scrubbing and that no one had managed to reproduce his problem. In his thread on the DUC, in which he spends quite a bit of time talking to himself, Matt-o- from Germany has now reproduced Mike’s problems in part. Mike’s dealer’s tech guru also suggested that running the HW Buffer size on 1024 samples might not be the best answer and that he should use a lower buffer size like 256 samples.
So armed with all this information I opened up my 10.2 system this morning and ran a session to find the screen refeshing was very slow so the metering was very jumpy and the counter wasn’t running smoothly.
I tried a diferent session but same problem. Changing the HW Buffer size didn’t change it. Allowing the Disk and Timecache to fill up didn’t help.
So I decided to trash the Preferences etc. I quit Pro Tools (very important at this point). Then ran the great little application Pro Tools Prefs and Database Helper application. I backed up my settings and then trashed them all. Resarted the computer (also important after a preference trashing session) and ran Pro Tools and immediately reset all the prefereces back to the way I like them. Opened a session and it ran as smooth as clockwork. Sorted or so I thought.
I then had problems opening Apple’s Mail. Eventually quit PT and Mail and all my other apps that I have running all came up OK. Ran Pro Tools and I am back with jumpy metering and lumpy clock. So I quit all these apps and ran them up one at a time to see which one was upsetting Pro Tools. Of course it was the last one, Chrome. So before I trashed Chrome, I tried closing the window and Pro Tools was happy. Then I tried displaying each of the tabs and that had a positive impact on Pro Tools. However I noticed that once I had viewed tabs that had a lot of animated ads etc Pro Tools was happy. So now I have all my normal apps open with Pro Tools playing nicely.
Conclusion
So it seems that Chrome was hogging display cycles sorting out the web pages and the animated and flash based ads weren’t helping either. As you can see some external forces apparently unrelated to Pro Tools can have an impact and also that changing one thing at a time and then doing back to confirm the problem is repeatable is important. Mike Aition did the right thing in referring to his dealer for advice. Also if I hadn’t checked what my other apps were doing I would have incorrectly come to the conclusion that trashing the prefernce had fixed it.
So I am running my HD buffer size at 256 samples now, and I will see how we go. Meanwhile Mike Aition isn’t feelng as lonely. He has dropped back to 10.1.3 thanks to his back up strategy using Super Duper to keep a working copy of his startup drive. He is also going to make a duplicate 10.2 startup drive set the HW buffers down to 256 ad see what happens. I will keep you posted.