Do Not Adjust Your Set

I was hoping to use the week-end to upgrade the Pro Tools platform from 6.4 to 6.7. The upgrade is a 43MB download from the Digidesign website. I spent several hours trying to download the file.

To ensure legal download of the upgrade, Digidesign presents a web-based form to gather specific information such as the serial number of the Pro Tools installation. From there, you are redirected to a secure site to download the upgrade. I could only get 1MB downloaded before I received a “download decoding failed” error. I quickly became locked into the classic “let’s try it again” mode of resolving the problem. I repeated this sequence half a dozen times before I finally concluded that this download was not working.

I searched the web to see if there was any commentary on the download decoding error. Several sources suggested that this was a common feature of Safari, the Mac OSX browser. A workaround is to use a different browser or download from a Wintel machine. I tried Internet Explorer on the Mac. Instead of a download decoding error, this browser simply stopped responding after 1MB. Again, I repeatedly tried to download the upgrade. And, again, I got nowhere. I finally bailed from the Mac platform and tried to download on a Wintel box. No joy.

Sigh.

I checked the Digidesign site this morning and found this little “alert”:

Software Downloads Temporarily Unavailable

We are having some network storage device problems that came up this weekend. Most software downloads are affected, including demo downloads and software updates. We are working to fix the problem, but we do not expect the problem to be resolved until sometime on Sunday or Monday.

Perhaps this was a sign to hold off on the upgrade?

The joys of recording.