Hello friends, I have a problem with my pro tools free on my powerbook pismo. I used to be able to record with it but now I can only edit. When I try to record it tells me, 'unable to allocate disk space, disk may be fragmented'. I can however record on my soundedit program, so I think my computer is lying to me. Pro tools has done this to me in the past and I allocated more memory to the program and that fixed it, but it was only a temporary fix. I also tried to defrag and no luck. If anyone can help me I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

AL.

I got the same message until I read about it on the DigiDesign conference Web site. Did you set your recording time before recording? Otherwise your computer will think it needs all the space in the world to record. Hope it helps. If not, check the DigiDesign User Conference on their site.

important info for anyone using ProTools!

Make sure to check your settings in the DAE that runs in the background for ProTools. I had same problem with my Digi 001 setup after installing a brand new Glyph 30gb firewire drive. If you look in right corner of screen where you find the app switcher while running PT... you should see the DAE app... select it then look in the File menu at top and you see a place to set prefs... make sure to set Playback buffer to 2 or 4 and see if this helps. Also make sure that your RAM cache in memory control panels is set to 512k as well. This may help solve your problem as it did mine. And it may be possible that your drive is fragmented... try checking it with norton speed disk and if it says moderate to heavy... then optimize. Also setting the recording size as mentioned by Torrent will help too.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the help guys, I'm back on track. However, my RAM cache in memory control has been at 8160k. Should I change it to 512k like you said? Also, how do I set my recording time before recording? Thanks again.

AL.

Well RAM cache is determined by default according to how much RAM you are using but a tech at Sweetwater explained that it should be at 512k for best results when using audio recording software but you may not have to do this. If I am correct... this is disk space that RAM uses and less would mean it has to read the drive less which in turns means more drive cycles dedicated to the actual audio recording and thus less chance of a 'hicup' or bad recording.

Check your preferences in PT for the audio recording time. Somewhere in the prefs there is a spot to limit recording time globally and I would set it at 6-15min depending on how long most of your recordings are.

Glad you got things working again though.

If you are unable to globally set your recording time, which would be the best situation, you can do it per song from the recording controls window.

- Once you set up a track as record-ready, find the 'start', 'end', and 'length' counters in the recording window, next to the buttons.
- Set your counter to read 'minutes/seconds' if not already.
- Type in the approximate amount of minutes your song will take in the 'length' window. You will notice that the 'end' counter will change accordingly.

With this change made, continue with your normal recording process and everything should work smoothly.

im hoping someone out there can help me with pro tools free

i actually got the cd from digidesign so there shouldnt have been too many problems but after loading it on my imac ..i tried to start it but i gets to where it says loading DAE and then freezes.......
i went to the digi web site and found out there was a netscape plug in confilct so i removed that but still freezing at the same spot......

any clues on how to fix

all will be appreciated