Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay on blog posts recently. Don’t worry, everything in my life is pretty much, well, as good as it can be right now. I lost a few opportunities because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m still healthy and have a good relationship with my family which is, frankly, a lot to be thankful for. I’m also using the pandemic unemployment as the government arts grant I always deserved.

I want to thank you for reading. You’re part of 1,000 regular visitors moving about 4.5 GB of bandwidth every month. For non-technical people, bandwidth is basically how much data a website moves. Text websites like my blog and other ones tend to move very little, if at all, data. The fact we’re moving so much data is amazing.

Anyways, I ran into an odd issue with Pro Tools and updating my computer’s BIOS fixed it. I wanted to share my solution with you in case, like me, you tried and tried to fix something without getting anywhere.

After a period of extreme burnout, I’m back to writing again. I’ll try to publish every week this time. Next week’s post is a dialogue I wrote about music genres. Don’t worry, if you’re not a musician you’ll get a lot out of it. I don’t spend too much time on the details. Instead, I use two unnamed characters to explain the musical mindset I have. Besides, details are for nerds to feel smart. Beleive it or not, it’s much harder to discuss overall abstract structures and approaches then spend time working out the details of what compressoror chord to use.

Now, back to the post. Here we go:

The Issue

I had an issue with Pro Tools on Windows 10 where it always generated an error “Pro Tools ran out of CPU power. Try de-activating or removing Native plug-ins. (AAE -9173)” even if I played a blank project. I have good hardware (Fireface UCX and Ryzen 5 2600 32 GB low latency RAM) and the rest of my machine appeared to work perfectly. My Cubase and Ableton sessions still worked just fine. I tried re-installing Pro Tools, the PACE drivers, my graphics driver, network driver, and nothing worked. I ran Windows Update, and went through Device Manager to ensure everything is working. I updated my audio drivers and re-installed all the Avid drivers. I even ran the Emsisoft Emergency Kit to scan for malware Kaspersky may have missed. Nothing worked.

I referred to the Pro Tools documentation and went through the optimization guide. I went through all the steps, even though some of them will hamper your overall computing experience. On a side note, UAC is a critical security measure in Windows and I don’t see how disabling it would help Pro Tools. I don’t work for their engineering team, though, so what do I know. Anyway, the steps Avid recommended didn’t fix anything. I contacted their support and haven’t heard back.

The Fix

I updated the BIOS on my motherboard for unrelated reasons. I do this about once a year as part of the maintenance I do on my machine to keep things working. After updating the BIOS, Pro Tools works again. I hope this helps someone, and maybe if it helps enough people, Avid might consider adding it to the troubleshooting guide.

If you found this post through a search, I really hope this helps you solve your problem. Take care, keep calm, and always remember you have the power to fix your computer!