Welcome to Pro Tools on da cheap - I’m in no way an expert, and what follows is just “what works for me”. Have I missed something, made a glaring error, or flown in the face of common wisdom? By all means, post a (hopefully polite and cheery) comment and join the discussion.
Pro Tools is a powerful recording solution, that takes a fair amount of computer power to run. Especially on an older computer, getting things optimized is a must.
The best resource for hardware related info is the Pro Tools website; there’s a fantastic user forum, and you can even check specific models of hard drive for compatibility in the support section. Here’s what has worked for me.
I’m currently using a dual processor Apple G5 tower. It was the bomb back in the day, and it’s been a trooper. But I get a lot of hiccups when my track counts get high, and I’ve found some workarounds.
First, for Mac or PC, you need a few things; lots of RAM - at least 2 GB to start.
You need Pro Tools to be installed on your main system hard drive, and you need a second drive - either internal or external - for your music files. Both drives should be 7200 RPM speed.
If you’re using a Firewire interface, it really wants to be on its own Firewire bus. On a Mac, your front and rear panel Firewire jacks are all on the same bus. Pro Tools will run this way, but for about thirty bucks you can get a card that adds an extra bus to your tower (a few bucks more for a laptop, if your laptop has a cardbus).
Digidesign’s compatibility pages tell you which cards are tested and approved - when I added one, my track count went up noticeably.
I tried installing an external SATA card, but it brought Pro Tools to its knees (Photoshop sure dug it though!) The lesson there is, start out with as few peripherals and cards as possible, and slowly add things like PCI cards, scanners, etc. and watch for slowdowns.
DEALING WITH LATENCY AND TRACK COUNT.
To simplify, latency is the “delay” that can be heard when recording. You might be trying to play along with a recorded drum track, but each time you strum your guitar, it comes through the speaker (or headphones) noticeably delayed, making it very difficult to play “on the beat”. On a lower-powered system, there are workarounds, such as playing back as few tracks as possible when recording.
Pro Tools systems have settings to control the “Hardware Buffer Size”, which has a direct effect on latency. In an M-Audio system, you might choose between 128 samples (latency you really can’t hear) to 1028 samples (where you can barely record a thing). At 128 samples, Pro Tools can’t do as much - playing a lot of tracks will give you an error. Generally you record low, and mix high.
But what if you want to record a guitar solo and you need to hear the drums, the bass, the vocals? What if (like me) you use Strike for drums and it’s eating up all your computer power?
The Pro Tools CPU and Disk Usage Meter... kind of like a fuel gauge on a Hummer.
I’ve found the best thing to do is bounce to disk. With your buffer set high for mixing, you’ll record your entire mix and assign it to a stereo track. Then you disable all the other tracks, set your buffer low, make a new track and record some more. Then, step your buffer back up, toss that bounced track, and get back to mixing.
There are lots more uses for bouncing tracks, many of them CPU-power related, such as recording a track of vocals with all the plugins active, then disabling the original track. Then you have your vocal with all those CPU-killing effects, but to Pro Tools, it’s just another audio track.
Sound like greek to you? You’ll get very familiar with it over time - unless you have some shiny new Mac Pro with tons of RAM.
