The session in question is rather large, but all rendered audio with no live VIs causing a processing drain. Track count: 11 stereo audio tracks, 30 mono vocal tracks, submixing those down to 2 BGV auxes. Everything feeding a common bus pair with master fader. 24/44.1 WAV.
Buffer at 1024 of course!

I've recently upgraded my Mac to 5.1, 3.33 GHZ 12-processor with 48GB RAM. (Need to update my profile!) It's a strong machine.
So, it appears the playback buffer is filling rapidly and causing playback dropouts. I see no provision to alter the playback buffer on DP 9.12. Did it go away with the recent version update?
Possible cause (but hasn't happened before): all of these files reside on my main drive, where the app is. It's a large drive, and large sessions in the past have not bogged down like this.
Anybody have any idea what's going on? Help would be appreciated, in the middle of a large client remix project.
Greg
Austin TX