HELP! Pro Tools 9 Playback Device Issues

March 16, 2011 in How To's & Tips with 8 Comments

Pro Tools 9 is a remarkable leap in Avid’s flagship DAW, but with the new advances come a little confusion and frustration, but FEAR NOT. My hardship is your gain. Is your 002, 003, or Mbox getting the awful error: “Pro Tools could not initialize the current playback device?” Its really annoying and it appears you are completely powerless because you can’t select any options to change anything so you’re stuck right??!!

Not necessarily.

What’s going on is your Pro Tools instance playback device isn’t matching the device settings stored. So how do you fix it?

Very simple. All you have to do is follow these instructions

1. Launch Pro Tools 9

2. When the splash screen appears on the screen, hold down the “n” key on your keyboard, which will eventually open the Playback Engine dialog for Pro Tools.

3. At the top of this window, you will see the ‘Current Engine’ drop-down menu.

4. Choose a different Engine (such as Pro Tools Aggregate I/O)

5. Click OK.

This should allow Pro Tools to launch.

Mac OS X Only

If the solution above fails, you can try deleting the “com.apple.audio.AggregateDevices.plist” preference on Mac OS X. You can find this preference file in the following location:

* Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences

If any of these don’t help your problem, you might want to try reinstalling or if you haven’t yet, installing the drivers.

You can find all the drivers HERE

Hope this helps

8 Responses to “HELP! Pro Tools 9 Playback Device Issues”

Karl August 19, 2011 at 4:07 pm #

This page saved me. Thank you.

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PaulH January 30, 2012 at 6:31 pm #

Dude… I cannot thank you enough for the blog of wisdom!. What a frustrating experience with the “cannot initialize device” on brand new Mbox Pro and version10.. You brought it home for many, im certain..
Thank you very much!
Paul

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FAMOS February 22, 2012 at 11:57 am #

I COULD NOT THANK U ENUFF… BACK TO SCHEDULED PROGRAMS

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Christl May 16, 2012 at 8:47 pm #

YOU SAVED MY LIFE!! MARRY ME? LMFAO, JK, BUT THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH

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Hornito and Igor June 20, 2012 at 5:01 pm #

Thanks so much!!! You saved us!!!

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John February 20, 2013 at 5:30 pm #

Thanks dude! Lifesaver tip.

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Cathy February 21, 2013 at 9:56 pm #

Thank you sooooooo much. I was ready to throw my mbp into the river until I found your post.

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Rach February 26, 2013 at 5:31 pm #

Phew! Great save

Was trying to open an old session in a new version, think it mixed things up. All sorted for now…

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