I need Help

[aopm08]

Well due to a beautiful event in my life I had to move my studio out of my house. My wife had I had a beautiful little girl so I decided to move the studio to my friend’s house. I have an older computer than him so I figured it would have been a piece of cake to get it to work. We are using adobe audition 1.5 and an Alesis multimix 8 firewire. When we run the multimix firewire in adobe audition 1.5 the program freezes once we stop recording and we can’t do anything else after that i have to shut down the computer. I tried just powering the device off and pressing the record button inside of audition without the multimix being power on and the program did not freeze. This is driving me crazy. I'm some what computer savvy but not very good when it comes to troubleshooting problems. He has a built in audio card which i disable and I ran through the installed for the multimix I have tried to put the new update on the mixer and it fails i get an error not really sure what is going.


Please help

[oretez]

First guess, and purely a guess is that this primarily a 'drivers' issue. & unfortunately probably has two parts. AA 1.5 is 'pre ASIO' so you tend to be relegated to WDM (or Hrdwr mnfc proprietary) drivers

Difficulty with that is that, certainly since Vista's audio changes there won't be any development work on WDM drivers.

You might try ASIO4ALL (which while primarily a way to force not ASIO components to work with ASIO components has demonstrated ability to patch a variety of sins)

2nd part of this is Firewire. You don't provide any info on new computer but all Audio A/D's with which I've worked are finicky concerning which firewire chips with which they'll work (TI and lucent have the broadest support) Assuming you recorded at all and the playback seemed OK chipset is probably not the main issue

But OS can be XP SP2 introduced some changes to firewire that caused problems with some audio hardware . . . Most of the companies for which this was a problem either supplied, on installation discs, or pointed to MS website a hotfix rollback to not SP2 drivers . . . I don't use SP3 (on audio machines) so don't know if it remained at issue . . . But rolling back firewire to SP1 state had not caused me an difficulties in using non audio gear (drivers, vid camera's etc.)

Finally the order in which a firewire device is 'powered' on, can make a difference with some firewire audio A/D cards. Have a Mackie supplied f/w option on an Onyx mixer had constantly need to remember that it not only has to be powered on after everything else (but before most audio apps) but typically I need to not even have the firewire cable plugged in. It is also sensitive to which f/w socket it is attached (preferring socket #1) I use this mixer on a number of machines, desk top and laptop by several different computer suppliers. The Mackie supplied card is very sensitive to order of attachment on all systems but a 2 and half year old T60 Thinkpad using Belkin Cardbus Firewire

To summarize: potential issues: matching hardware drivers to software; OS issues with firewire, which can include sequence in which devices are powered on.

[aopm08]

I will try some of these to see if i can get it to work. If you let me know what information you need from his computer when i go there again i can get you that information. I'm pretty sure he is running XP sp3 in my computer i was runing XP sp2. He has firewire ports that came with his pc i had purchase a pci firewire.
Thanks for those great sugestions I will give them a try and let you know how everything works out.

[aopm08]

So I went to my friend's house to try to see if I can figure out what was going on. I went ahead and deleted the drivers for the Alesis firewire mixer. Then shut off the pc and insert my firewire pci card. I saw that his firewire card was mix with usb ports and those usb ports were been use. Not sure if that would have been part of the issue. I connected the firewire to port one on the pci card and put the drivers again and it worked. I was very happy. I just wanted to thank you for your help. I figured I should used the firewire pci card that I installed in my pc just because you mention that firewire device are picky were they are connected.

[oretez]

my experience has been that combo usb/fire wire cards seldom play nice with audio cards . . . at some point years ago I even heard a reasonable explaination as to why that was the case . . . and now I'm going to have to go research it again

and glad you got the system to work

good luck