Hey man. Congrats on getting your interface to work. Here are my thoughts on the whole monitoring deal. I don't advise turning off the Pro Tools monitoring. Actually, I think it's better to shut off the multimix's monitoring instead. Here's why. The fact that you can hear your signal going into Pro TOols is a good indicator that you are actually recording. This was literally a 4 thousand dollar mistake one time when I worked with an engineer who was using direct monitoring on his interface. Stuff was coming through, but not routed properly through Pro TOols. Had direct monitoring been turned off, we would have caught it. Trust me on this one. 0 latency is no tradeoff for knowing exactly what kind of signal your getting into Pro Tools. I think there's a knob on the interface to turn direct monitoring off so you only hear what's coming through the USB input. That's what you want.
Regarding bouncing. Several factors could be at play here. 1. You're bouncing on a 54 hundred rpm drive. These drives are not really fast enough for recording. Trust me on this one too. I can't afford a faster drive, so I have to limp along. One thing I would try is to change the record allocation time for your drive. Right now, Pro TOols is set to record until the drive runs out. If you were to allocate only say 30 minutes to it, Pro TOols is now only allocating a tiny bit of drive space, allowing things to run much smoother. You can find that on the operations tab of the preferences. I'm not in front of my rig, so can't remember what it's called, but it's set to open ended allocation right now. It needs to be set to the other selection and a time frame given to it. Set it to 30 minutes or so. Also, how many tracks have you recorded before running a bounce? If you have a great deal of tracks, it's a good idea to consolidate them: taking all the punches and converting it to 1 long file per track. This actually helps with minimizing some of the load on the drive because it's only streaming one long file as opposed to playing back small clips. Also, if you have an external drive, maybe you could try bouncing to that. Anything to minimize the load on your internal will help. Any variable you can improve with your system will help. Trying maxing out the ram. 2 gb is really a tad low for Pro Tools. Ram is like 40 bucks anymore for 8 gigs, but I think your MacBook will max out at 4, which would be very helpful. Hope this helps. Kevin
