As any Pro Tools user can tell you, the devil is in the details.
Making sure that your system is properly optimized makes all the difference, as I found in my month-long battle with Spotlight.
It all began when I started having random kernel panics, which seemed to be attributable to a Spotlight conflict. So, I set out to correct the issue.
As specified by Digidesign on the DUC:
“If Spotlight Indexing is running in the background, this can cause errors in Pro Tools. You should make your recording and playback drives ‘private’ which will disable Spotlight indexing on those drives.” (via Digidesign)
This was easy enough to verify, but did not correct the issue. As I like to be extremely thorough, I found a way to permanently disable Spotlight on my machine. I hoped that this would fix the problem.
Oh how wrong I was! Had I been in my right mind, I would have remembered that Spotlight is the global search service for OS X.
Whoops? Yeah…
Thus, as one of the (seemingly) many Pro Tools users who has disabled Spotlight Indexing, only to have other application search services hobbled as well, I went looking for a suitable alternative.
While I appreciated the boosts in system performance after disabling Spotlight, I still wanted the ability to search across volumes, within packages and hidden files, etc. Really all I needed (I thought) was the ability to search for file names, not file contents.
Thankfully, EasyFind by DEVONtechnologies (freeware) had me covered on both fronts.
Granted, it wasn’t as fast as Spotlight since it searches for each query separately, as opposed to using the Spotlight Metadata system, but I could at least search now.
