Hello,
Recording multiple tracks to a FireWire drive results eventually in “too many tracks recording” errors and possibly disk corruption. This does not occur in v5.5.1.
We use Mac Pros (among other machines) with dual RME cards for large television productions. We usually record between 96 and 128 tracks, sometimes to an internal drive, sometimes to an external FireWire drive. We recently wiped, reformatted, and reinstalled two of our systems updating to v5.5.2; previously we were on v5.5.1. The install process was a fresh install to v5.5, then an update directly to v5.5.2. We’re somewhat adept at installing and quickly configuring a Mac workstation; we’ve done it many times and know the usual items to turn off and after installation tested recording 128 tracks to the internal sata drives.
At the next two shows these machines were doing (The Voice and the ACM Awards) both exhibited the same problem, one while recording only 64 tracks and one while recording only 48 tracks. With many tests, after an indeterminate period of time which ranged between an hour and 2.5 hours we would get an error of “too many tracks recording” with known high quality audio-qualified hard drives. Attempting to put Nuendo back into record would exhibit 64 “…could not write to file…” messages or something similar. As a part of these errors it appears the drive was corrupted as it was unavailable in Nuendo and became more unstable in the Finder becoming unavailable after a bit of looking. Repairing the drive resulted in no errors listed but ejecting the drive and remounting it made it available to the Finder and recordable in Nuendo.
After much troubleshooting, macos examination, and drive swapping we uninstalled v5.5.2 and it’s components and installed v5.5.1. After that both systems worked fine on FireWire drives, testing with 128 tracks then reducing to the shows’ required number of tracks.
During the v5.5.2 testing we were able to record to the internal sata drives with no noticeable issues; I don’t know if this is because the drive bottleneck still existed but the sata was faster therefore did not stop the recording or if it’s firewire specific.
Checking the usual Activity Monitor and the Console log the only log messages were the ones listing the “…could not write file…” Console messages. No Nuendo or it’s components’ error messages and no odd behavior in Activity Monitor.
Because both systems exhibited the same errors with a small number of tracks and both were fixed with downgrading to v5.5.1, and because we’re somewhat certain our systems are otherwise fine, it’s our conclusion there’s an issue recording with v5.5.2.
Hugh