try defragmenting your ext. hd

It says that I don't need to defragment my drive, should I just go ahead and defrag anyway?

defrag error

are you on a pc or a mac
if mac how do i defrag or make drive run faster
e-mail me At dj.spaz573@gmail.com

go to digidesign.com and go to their answer base page and type in the error message. here's one answer there:

"In one case making all Energy Saver controls set to Never and unchecking "Put hard disk to sleep when possible" resolved the problem."

there are 2 pages related to this error in the digidesign site.

Thanks Stickers

Hey Stickers thanks for the advice, I defragmented my drive, but that still didn't fix the error message. So I took the drum track and re-recorded it from a stereo track down to a mono track and now I can playback all three audio tracks.

Did you take stickers' advice and look for yourself on digidesign's website in the DUC? Have you called Digidesign tech support yet?

Those are the first places to start when dealing with issues specific to Pro Tools. There is a pleothora of information out there that you yourself can find if you will take the initiative rather than waiting for an answer here. And if you dig and find it yourself, you will probably learn 4 other things in addition.

bigtrey,

ummm you should be able to get a lot more tracks than just 3!!.

go to the DUC or answerbase at digidesign.com or call tech support. for the love of god!!

Stickers:

I am only working with these three tracks right now, I will probably add more tracks to round out the sound of the song. Thanks again for the advice, I did check out digi's website and even tried some of the things that they suggested.

Jd:

I did take stickers advice and looked at digi's website. I wasn't just waiting around for an answer. I did try some of the suggestions offered, but that didn't work until I changed the drum track from stereo to mono. So does that mean I have to make all tracks mono and then mix them down to a stereo track? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.

No, it shouldn't make a difference whether you're dealing with stereo or mono tracks. The problem is more fundamental than that and while it's good that you found a work around, it doesn't address the issue. To me, it sounds like a hardware issue. De-fragmenting is never bad, is always good, and should be done regularly regardless of what the analysis says, IMHO. Have you been all the way through the specs on your computer and checked them against Digi's compatibility documents on their website (from the MOBO's chipset to preferred hard drive interfaces/formats)? They document known issues fairly well. And again, pick up that phone and call Digi's tech support if you're having problems resolving this issue on your own. That's what tech support is there for.

Jamie:

Before I bought the Mbox I did go through the specs on digi's web page to make sure that my laptop had a compatible chipset and all of that. I had to upgrade my RAM though and that seemed to be the only issue as far as compatibility. I am going to go back to digi's site to find out if my harddrive is compatible. I know that it is 7200 rpm, 80GB, but I can't seem to find the specs on its seek time. I was thinking that it may be the harddrive itself because it is usb based. I was also thinking of using a kit to change my drive from usb based to firewire based. Any suggestions on a particular kit to use to do that? Just curious. Do you know where on digi's site that I can find the preferred harddrive interface/formats? After I post this I am going to the site to check, but if I can get a quicker answer to what I am looking for then that would be great. Thanks. I'll also give tech support a call to see if they can possibly give me some answers.

http://www.digidesign.com
>Support
>Compatitbility
Mbox
>Pro Tools LE 6.7 for Windows XP
Performance Guidelines
>Hard Drive Minimum Requirements

While they do not say that USB is not supported, the letters USB don't even appear anywhere on that page. They only detail support for SCSI, IDE/ATA and FireWire. I recently installed a SATA drive as my audio drive in my Digi001 system and it works flawlessly, although they do not mention support for SATA, either. Maybe USB is the issue for you. Their hard drive support is very well documented on their site. Check it out and contact tech support. Good luck.

Jamie:

I think that I may have found a solution to the problem. On digi's website it said:

Windows XP is unable to create a FAT32 partition on a drive that is larger than 32 GB. If your drive is larger than 32 GB, either use a partitioning application such as PartitionMagic® or use the NTFS file system.

So right now I am going to convert the Fat32 partition to an NFTS partition, maybe this will work to solve the audio playback problem. It's weird because my drive is FAT32 partitioned and it is an 80GB drive.