MachFive kills my Pro Tools sessions

charlzj · Post by **charlzj** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 6:22 am

Anyone have this problem with MachFive/ProTools? MachFive works fine, but if I save the PT session which includes an instantiation of MachFive, the session will no longer subsequently re-open. The PT session will try to open, but when it attempts to load the M5 plug-in, PT freezes. I have to force-quit ProTools and remove the M5 plug-in from PT's plug-in folder in order to be able to ever open the session again. I experience the same problem on my dual 1G G4 running PT6.9 on Panther (HD3Accel), my new dual 2.7G5 running PT7 on Tiger (HD3Accel again) and at other studios on completely different systems. This happens to me every time without exception. Of course I always download and install the latest upgrades, but nothing helps. And it doesn't matter what is loaded into MachFive - this happens even if no sounds are loaded into M5.

russhughes · Post by **russhughes** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 1:05 pm

Have you tried uninstalling it. Trashing your digi pref folder and also all instances of the Digi database folder and then reinstalling it?

It loads fine on my PT7.0 system.

I had this problem with Atmosphere and this cured it.

charlzj · Post by **charlzj** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 5:23 pm

Russ, thank you very much for your suggestions. I followed your recommended procedure, including reinstalling the factory MachFive Sounds Folder on a new drive. And everything worked! ...that is, until I tried opening my test session again, only this time directing MachFive to my original MachFive Sounds Folder instead of the little factory one. The old problem came right back.

My MachFive Sounds Folder is a 103G library of sounds (on a 250G external firewire drive) including many commercially available libraries as well as a very large and constantly growing collection of homegrown samples (most of which were UVI-Extracted from my pre-existing custom Akai S6000 library).

So the problem is buried somewhere within 103 Gigs of material. I have run disk repair on the drive containing this library, and nothing needed repair. I don't know where to begin trying to find the needle in this haystack. There are 84 folders within the MachFive Sounds Folder, each containing a lot of stuff. A fellow MachFive user once told me that UVI-extracted samples are problematic this way, which just about kills the usefulness of MachFive to me, if this is true.

I also noticed that the factory Sounds Folder has a numbering scheme inside for all the nested sub-folders. Their names each begin with 01-, 02-, etc. Does anyone know if there's a reason for this? I guess I will begin methodically renaming the folders with this numbering system and adding them one at a time to my new drive, and then try to launch PT/M5 after adding each folder.

In the meanwhile, can anyone else shed any light on this? Thanks in advance!

jorbi · Post by **jorbi** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 7:42 am

Howdy, I've had the same sort of problem running Mach 5 in PT on my G5. I close a session with Mach 5 but then need to completely quit ProTools before opening a new session. I did trashing of preferences and reinstalling, etc. Nothing really helped. I recently upgraded to 7.0 and am now using Mach5 as RTAS. Before I was using it as HTDM, unaware that this is apparently bad. I seem to be getting better performance, but I'm still having sessions crash with much too much frequency.

matwell · Post by **matwell** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 4:10 am

Wish I could be more helpful. All I can say is that with Pro Tools LE 7 and a Digi 002R or Mbox, MachFive works fine as an RTAS plug-in. Keep in mind that this is LE and not TDM.

Good luck!

utility531 · Post by **utility531** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 8:50 am

I don't use pro tools so please keep that in mind. Have you tried creating a separate M5 folder and slowly adding sounds (start with one bank of sounds) to find the culprit. O course you will have to redirect M5 to that folder. I know this could be a tedious task but at least it might tell you that the problem is really somewhere in the M5 Folder. If it works fine with one bank, try adding a bigger chunk of banks and see what happens and so on.

My M5 folder is about 35 Gigs which I thought was huge. yours is 3 times that. You might want to ask Motu if there is a limit to what M5 can handle.

saibot · Post by **saibot** » Tue Aug 22, 2006 7:45 am

hi there,
i got the same problems with my mach 5 now. i‘ve benn using it for over 2 years now without any problems.
i got a dual 2 G5 (os 10.3.9)and i‘m running pro tools 6.2.2 LE.
suddenly all the pro tools-sessions that have the mach5 in them (and that‘s pretty much every session i got) won‘t reopen.
i really checked it by creating new test-sessions , once with the sampler in it , once without .
it looks like this : the session starts to load and then stops at one point and behind the loading status window a white
window (maybe alert window) appears and then it stops and the session doesn‘t come up.
befor ifound out it has to do with the sampler i reinstalled pro tools - without success.
is there anything you can tell me what i can do ?
do i have to reinstall the sampler?
and how can i be sure that none of my mach 5 settings get lost if i do so?

ManOtunes · Post by **ManOtunes** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 7:50 pm

A while ago, without realizing it, i changed the name of one of the folders in the sounds folder. I inserted a "/". For some reason, machfive can't tolerate that symbol at all. It was crashing constantly until someone told me to eliminate all the /'s.

so it's certainly worth making sure it's not in there. having said that, i've been having severe/annoying problems with the machfive. when i try to load around 3 instances of it, 16 channels each, logic crashes. i know this computer can handle drastically more than that.

i used to use cubase vst 5.1 / OS9 on this computer and i easily loaded 8 instances of halion. 16 channels each.
in fact, my desire to load many more sampler instances was one of the main reasons i switched to logic and machfive.

i checked the activity monitor and i had like a gig of ram to spare. could it be true that the machfive, while elegantly constructed on the screen, is full of fatal bugs underneath the hood?

ManOtunes · Post by **ManOtunes** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 7:51 pm

oh, i use a G4 1.25 ghz, 2 gig RAM with logic 7.2

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