Pro Tools 5.1 / OS 8.6 / Direct Connect "not enough DSP" for plugin ...

[d97]

Hi all ... I am new to the the world of Pro Tools and just recently kitted out a powermac 9600 with a d24 card, two DSP farm cards and a Sample Cell II card.  They are all connected together with a cable.  I'm not loaded with Ram at this stage (somewhere upwards of 320 megs) but I can't figure out why, with all the available processing power that I should have, I can't get a single instance of either Retro AS-1, Unity DS-1 or Vibra to instantiate.

With an empty session, I'll create a midi track and a Stereo Aux track.  I'll assign one of the soft synths to the Midi Track and then try to activate the direct connect plugin on the Aux track.  The machine will chunk away for a couple of seconds and will comeback with an error code something like "not enough free DSP, error -7204."

The two farm cards have the older chipset and I've installed the latest direct connect plugin and stream extension.  I couldn't get a stable OS 9.1 install on the machine and decided to go with 8.6 - I wonder if that could be the problem. 

If anybody has any ideas, I'd definitely appreciate hearing them.

Thanks.

D.

[IIO]

none of the three synths you mentioned is a real TDM plug-in, they all run on the PC.

as for the koblo, even with the rtas bridge you might see an error about "not enough CPU" here - this is a known bug.

do you get other TDM plug-ins to work?

[Syntho]

I don't know if there is a list floating around somewhere, but there are 'old' and 'new' TDM plugins. The old ones ran on everything up until the Mix cards came out, and the 24/Mix cards have their own set of plugins. The chips changed a bit, so the plugins had to too. When I tried launching some older plugs with my Mix card, it wouldn't work. I imagine it's the same vice versa. I may not be 100% with all of this, but it's at least  something like that.

[d97]

Thanks for taking the time to give me a couple of answers.   I really appreciate it. 

I am definitely able to get other TDM plugins to work and so I am now wondering if it's a case of memory allocation an CPU allocation.  (Like I said in my post, I'm brand new to the whole Pro Tools thing)  I have given DAE and ProTools more memory than they want - I can't remember how much - and in the hardware settings connected to CPU power, I have set it at something like 70% (I'm really not sure what I am doing here).  Is it possible that reallocating some memory might & taking down the CPU power given to the cards might help?

Also - I will have access to a mix card in a little while so I might try it using that - I do remember reading something about the thing that Syntho was mentioning.  The two TDM farm cards that I have are "old chip" cards and will only run in pre-G3 hardware - hence the 9600 rather than one of my G4s.  If there is a list, I'd appreciate seeing it.  I have been trying to run the Virus Plugin from a TDM collection that comes from the Macintosh Garden and I'm getting the same message. 

[IIO]

well all i can tell (not a PT user here) is that if you get an error message that there would be not enough processing power from the DSP cards to run the koblo direct connect thing, that this error message is aready fishy.

the bitheadz stuff is for sure so old that it might actually be incompatible with PT 5. but koblo 2.5 shouldnt.

maybe try an NI product with DC next, and see if that works.