Newbie freaking out about incessant CPU warnings on PT LE 7.3

[Callum911]

Hi guys, i'm brand new to this site, and relatively new to Protools. I've recorded a handful of songs using an MBox 2 pro, on LE 7.3.1 on an old eMac (with i think 1 Ghz processor and 1.2Gb ram), but I would be stopped 20 seconds through playback with an error saying 'your running out of CPU power, rmove plug-ins or increase CPU Usage Limit'. This would frequently happen whenever I had more than about 2 stereo tracks.

Thinking it was due to my weak computer specs, I just bought a Macbook Pro with 2.6 Ghz and 4 GBs ram. Im saving all my songs to a 500gb external harddrive with a firewire 800 cable, but the problem hasn't gone away, if anything, its gotten worse. I can't listen to more than 15 seconds of a 5 track song, at the intro where there's actually only 3 tracks playing (with reverb plug-ins) before the warnings appear. In the 'Playback Engine' I have the CPU Usage Limit set to the highest possible (90%), im using 2 RTAS processors, the H/W Buffer Size at 1024 samples, and the DAE Playback Buffer at level 2 (default).

I am going insane trying to figure out what is going wrong. This is the most powerful Apple laptop available - surely I don't need a stronger computer to work on a 5 track song? I really hope someone can help me out of this mess and start getting my songs down!! Cheers, Callum

[Greg the Producer]

are you properly cleaning out your region list of unused audio files when your done your session? if your not that could be your problem because all those unused wav files just take up space and they will fragment your hard drive. so when you playback audio your system is being less responsive because it cant buffer fast enough. also when actually recording you want your playback buffer set on the normal setting to the zero setting, and you want your cpu usage to be at the minimum. also lower your sample rate 1024 is too high, start at 256 and work up from there, i find that 512 will give you the happy medium. now when you are editing and mixing and and sticking plugins all over the place, turn up your buffer speed and your cpu usage and your system will process and playback the audio more efficiently with less or no REMOVE SOME RTAS PLUGINS warnings. also one other tip, when using delays and reverbs dont insert a delay on each track you want to apply the effect too, add a stereo aux input and insert the plug in on it, assign its input to a unused stereo bus, its out put to master, and then take each track that you want to have that effect and use one of the sends and assign it the same bus you put on the aux, now that you have done this you can mix the dry(uneffected) signal from each track with the wet(effected) signal you sent to the aux. and this is a good way to limit the amount of plugins used in a session and save your cpu some processing power! hope this helps

[Callum911]

thanks Greg, Interesting about using a stereo aux input, that sounds like it will help a lot. Though I haven't had a chance to try your suggestions as yet, but when I get the time to I will. Thanks for helping!