Xanthus Posted January 2, 2009 Report Share Posted January 2, 2009 As some of you might have heard, I got a Mac a few months ago, and due to classes, work, girlfriend, and the school musical I haven't really had that much time for anything other than dinking around on the guitar. Now that it's break, I'm trying to set up my recording "studio" again. I installed Pro Tools onto the Mac a few days ago, and ran into a pretty significant snag. When I try to open a new session I get this error message: "Session must be on an audio record volume." So I go into Workspaces and click on my hard drive and try to set the A column to R. I get this: "'Macintosh HD' cannot be designated as an Audio Record volume because it is not a valid audio volume." I can't open any of my work files because of this, as well. All of the help I could find online was, well, not helpful. I can't even call tech support because I've had my product for more than 30 days, and would have to talk to Premium Tech Support or some bullshit that will run me $3+ per minute, most of which will be dealing with hold music or stuff I've already done. The only info that I found that was helpful was getting an external hard drive. The only possible reason I can gather from this, knowing the ins-and-outs of computers fairly well, is that Pro Tools doesn't want you recording your work onto the system hard drive, that is, the hard drive that your operating system is installed onto. So does Digidesign just assume that everyone has a second hard drive on their computer? Or that Macs, the #1 computer for AV work, don't sell a laptop, their most popular computer type, with two hard drives? I mean, that's pretty presumptuous, to say the least. Fortunately for me, I just bought an external HDD. Western Digital 500GB, 7200RPM, Firewire 400, the whole deal. But see, this HDD was the one I bought to put all my Windows games on it. Once I get around to using Boot Camp to put Windows on my Mac, I would install all of my much-missed computer games on the external so I can play them again, leaving the actual laptop as free of general Windows nastiness as possible. But Pro Tools is basically forcing me to use my new purchase for my music projects. Does anyone know a way to finagle Pro Tools to let me save on my system drive? I could format the new HDD to FAT32, but I would rather not. I mean, FAT32.... speaks for itself haha. As a side note, I stumbled upon this: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ Pretty interesting. Does anyone have any experience with it? It seems to be for using a windows computer with the occasional interfacing with Macs, but I would be using it as the complete opposite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert_the_damned Posted January 3, 2009 Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 Yup you've basicly found what you need to do: you can't work straight onto the system HD. Infact I'd advise getting a firewire harddrive as if you're trying to record more than a few channels at once you need the higher data transfer rate. Pro Tools is really nice and can get some cool sounds but in my experiance can be such a pain in the arse if it wants to be. You should be able to partition your external harddrive and have one partition for your windows OS and the other for Mac. Don't know how to do this on a Mac though I'm affraid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xanthus Posted January 4, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2009 (edited) Thanks for the advice, Rob. I unpacked and hooked up the MyBook I bought, and plugged it into the mac, whereupon it gave me the same issue as my system hard drive, not a valid audio volume. I took it down to the Windows computer and reformatted the thing to NTFS (it came shipped in FAT), plugged it in, and still the same damn thing. I can format it in MacOSX on the Apple, but I don't know how that will fare if I then try to hook it up to a Windows machine. Only one way to find out, really. I'm debating just taking the monetary hit and calling Advanced tech support or whatever that is. I just want this crap to work. ::EDIT:: Formatting this HDD into Mac Extended Journaled didn't work either. Now I'm officially out of ideas...... Edited January 4, 2009 by Xanthus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert_the_damned Posted January 5, 2009 Report Share Posted January 5, 2009 As far as I can remember you'll need to format the drive to HFS+ for use with protools. I think you also need to tell protools that its ok to record to it somehow, I'm not sure how you do this (trying to get my friend to explain this in the pub last night probably wasn't the best idea ). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xanthus Posted January 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 6, 2009 I never thought Smithwicks went well with computer programming either Thanks for the help Rob. After a combined hour on the phone today talking to this and that guy, I fixed the problem via - drum roll here - a free download from the Digidesign website! *faceplant* Now I'm upgraded for free to 7.4.2, so I'm pretty all set. AND I can record onto whichever hard drive I feel like. So in theory, I actually could save my external for my video games. Even though all this is said and done, it still doesn't really quench my desire to get Logic Studio..... I mean, a ton of software plugins, MainStage, SoundtrackPro, virtual instruments that sound REALLY good (I'm a big computer guy, give me virtual knobs over real ones any day), freeing up one of my USB slots, and I'll be able to use my One on One service with it.... it's really no contest. Aside from the $500 price tag.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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