slowed down playback with external harddrive???

I got this maxtor 160 gig portable hd to use off at school. figured i could work on my home sessions at my school's studio. everything's been working fine. plug it in at school, i can mix and everythings great, then i bring it home, and again, can mix with no problems, until tonight. just started working on a new song. recording drums. i go to listen to old kick drum sounds to see if i've got the right sound going on in the new demos and the playback for the old session is like, 1/2 speed. when i went to load the other session of of my mac's harddrive, it asked me to "check disk allocation." I have received this prompt before, but i've never had the slow playback problem. when i first experienced the problem, the maxtor wasn't plugged into the computer at all. so i figured i'd try plugging it in, but that didn't work. neither the sessions on my mac's hd nor my sessions on my portable hd (which are the same exact sessions) would playback normal speed. BUT, the sessions i've begun tracking this evening played back fine. no problems there. i recorded them right to the mac hd. anyone ever had this problem? i'm assuming its a pretty easy fix..i think i'm just missing something somewhere inside the "check disk allocation" prompt. its telling me that certain files are unreadable or something...whats the deal??!? god, i hope you guys can help me. thanks in advance. is it possible that i did something wrong when saving the mac hd sessions to the maxtor hd?? all i did was drag and drop. i was told that was all i had to do?!

Your sample rates are not matching up. You must have brought home something with a different sample rate. Common problem.

can anybody help me out??

Right.. you have a sample rate mismatch.. search the DUC.. it's been discussed a lot before. BTW I'd recommend you never drag and drop.. rather use the Save Session Copy In... command inside Pro Tools. This will ensure you don't accidently forget (or lose) an audio file. Rail

Do you use the software that came with the drive? I dont use it and everything works well. Sounds like if it was working before and it suddenly changed then Something a bit off topic, but do you partition the disk and if so, how big are your partitions?

regarding your sessions and sample rates: Under windows, open up the "Session Setup" window and check the sample rate. Then open the sessions you've recorded recently and check against those. If they are different (44.1 vs. 48k), you have a sample rate mismatch. Simple to fix, open a new session at the correct sample rate and import the files from your old session, making sure to "convert" vs. "add". If that isn't the problem, it's possible that there was an error during copying from the school's hd to your external. if the files are still at school, try going back and re-copying the files. good luck, let us know how it goes. Alex

The sample rates were my first thought as well, so I went and checked those out, but all of the recording has been done on my home mac, and was done in 44.1. I've brought all of my sessions over to my external hd and mixed at school, but we use the same sample rate there, 44.1. I've tried making copies of the sessions and bringing them into a totally new session, but still, playback is really slow. we sound like a death metal band!!! I just can't figure it out...can you change the sample rate inside a session? I searched for that, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Does anybody know about, or has anyone ever received, a "check disk allocation" when going from their mac's hd to a external? Am I going to be able to get my sessions back to sounding normal? This is the first problem I've run into *knock on wood* yet with my mac, and I've had it for months..It is very weird, however, that it was working all of this time, (past 2 months) and then just started not working. Is it possible that other files (photoshop files) that are located on my external hd, could be causing this situation? I don't have photoshop on my home computer, but it is on the machines at school... thanks. JK.

Your sessions may be 44.1 on both your school and home system.. but if they're externally clocked to the wrong sample rate you'll have a similar problem as you describe. Can you tell us (quantify) the amount of pitch change you're hearing? Rail

another way to check the files themselves: in the finder, switch the view to "columns" , far right of the three options. then find your audio files and play them back via the built-in player. if they play back slow, you know it's the files themselves, not the session or your computer.