Hi guys. I am new around here but have been watching for a while and your posts helped me get rid of all the bugs with my multimix 16 firewire mixer. Anyway I finally got it running perfect yesterday and now a new problem....the mixer has died. I was recording with the desk and an error window came up in cubase to say it couldnt find the desk. I decided to power cycle the mixer and that should solve the glitch. I powered it down...went to power it up again and it was dead. The desk and power source seemed to be very VERY HOT. Please help...I am going out of my mind. Could I have a faulty power adapter or maybe just blown a fuse? PLEASE PLEASE HELP.

Just wonderin if anyone can shed any light on the problems i've been having with my desk.

I bought the multimix16 cos it looked a good deal, and my system specs were compatible.
It first turned up without a power supply, so i got them to send one to me. After about an hour of playing around and setting it up, my PC (i know.......i need a mac really!) would no longer recognise the desk. All drivers were working correctly, and my firewire port was tested with a DV camera, and this worked ok.
Call Alesis (again!), who say i will have to mail it back to them so their techie's can fix it (£50 down the drain). Since then i haven't had much time to put it into proper use, as, being a student i am trying to work my ass off to earn enough cash to back to uni.
However, of the three times i have used it, it is flippin AMAZING! My PC chuggs along recording 16 simultaneous tracks, and it still manages to keep a fairly "analog" sound.
I'm dead chuffed. But yesteday, i fully booted up the PC, waited for XP to load, but i had the same problem, i could not get my system to recognise the desk. All drivers are ok, all ports are functioning. I've noticed, when the desk is first powered up, after a second or so, the level meters flash up for a second. This, i'm assuming is the firewire software in the desk loading, as my PC won't recongise anything 'til this has been done. Once the desk has "booted", the PC pops up and informs me that it has found the desk ok.
I mailed/called/pestered Alesis, who tell me i am correct. The desk needs to "boot" before the mac/PC will recognise it. I ask them if there is a master reset procedure ( sometimes you can switch on the power whilst holding down a button and it will take you to a menu, or reset - but the only thing i seem to be able to do is to hold down the FX select button whilst turning it on, and that does b**ger all, just says "1.0" on the display instead of the usual "00"). Once again, i have packed up the desk, and mailed it back to Alesis ( another £50).
If anyone has experienced a similar problem, or if anyone knows how to get around this problem, i would really appreciate some help, cos i can't afford to keep sending it back.
Failing that, sell it and buy the Phonic version ( feedback welcome...!!!).

Cheers peeps! Keep it real.

Just wondering do you unplug the power supply when you are not using the MultiMix? I do not leave mine pluged in when not in use.
The FX select button is just what it says it is. It selects what FX you want to use with the MultiMix.

randy

hey randy

yeah i always safely remove the device from the system, then turn the power off at the console, and then finally when PC has shut down, i turn off the power at the mains.
I have always been careful to power up/down the FW16 in the correct order so i don't fry any circuitry. So far Alesis have not helped me at all:

TheEngineer 6/22/2006
Do not be cheap when buying audio gear.
Do not bother calling Alesis for tech support.

They have not managed to shed any light on the problem, and it appears as if they are unwilling to explain why, after having made three amazing recordings of about 20-25 mins each, my desk has packed up.

I don't know if I am correct or not, but i get the feeling that Alesis are trying to cover-up their product defects, so as to keep it quiet from the public eye.
Are they aware of this forum? Have they not twigged that after the thousands of calls/emails they receive from cheesed-off FW16 owners, it's time to try something different?
Sorry you'll have to exuse me....i'm a tad frustrated, but thanks for getting back to me Randy. As some other dude wrote this forum is the best thing ever.

Suggestion for Alesis: Get rid of your tech support dept! Direct new customers here instead! They can expect faster, more friendly service, and the occasional answer!! AND WE HAVE SMILEYS!!!

The order that I use (might not make any difference) is to remove the device from the system, turn off PC, turn off the MultiMix and then turn off the power at the main.

Sorry that things are not going well, post back if you need more help.

randy

Hi all.

I have a home studio using Sonar 5 Producer. I bought a Multimix8 Firewire a couple of months ago purely for recording drums. But, like so many here, I've run into a problem. First, I've had to use the ASIO driver settings to get the thing to record with out the popping. I fooled around with the latency setting, but that didn't do a thing. The ASIO setting worked fine, as long as I set the recording to 48k. Which it calls for, I think. Anyway, I've got my guitar, bass and vocal tracks humming along and the drummer is playing and the Multimix is recording 5 simultainous tracks without a hitch. Well, so the drummer flubbs a crash or something, and stops, and I undo recording. No problem. So the drummers ready, I hit record again, and it's like Sonar kicks into high gear and starts zipping across the tracks in a digital screech. I hit stop, undo recording, and hit record again, and get the same thing. Once this happens, there's nothing to do but shut down Sonar, which of course, doesn't want to be shut down. It just sits there, so I ctrl>alt>delete at this point, and soon get the familier error message regarding sonar.exe, and do I want to send report etc...etc.. When the unit works, it works well. We recorded several takes after one such shut down, and just when this drummer was about to nail it, Sonar acted up and we just called it a night.

I've updated the Multimix8. I've not called their tech support, which is apparently a waste of time. So I was wondering if anyone here has had this particular problem. There is a setting in the ASIO panel that refers to Kernal (Sonar), which I made sure was checked. That seemed to help, but just when I thought that had solved the problem, it got hyper on me again. It's like Sonar just locks up. You can't even play the tracks when this happens, much less record. It just reverts back to digital noise.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

wystan

Intel Pentium D 3.0 GHz processor
2048 MB DDR2 ram
Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (all updates current)
3 firewire ports, but I'm not sure if they are "a" or "b".

Hey guys, first time poster.

I'm using Adobe Audition as my audio recorder, but I don't think that makes a difference in my case.

Funny enough, I went through all six pages and I haven't experienced any of the trouble everyone else has. My MultiMix 8 FireWire worked great, out of the box, plug and play (after installing drivers), I can turn it off and on and off and on and Audition and Windows will show the mixer appearing and dissapearing and yadda yadda yadda. Everything works great, it sends simultaneous tracks to the computer and it's awesome.

Except. The mixer seems to be rediculously sensitive and loud. Before I bought this mixer, I had a Behringer Eurorack UB802, a crappy little $50 mixer. I plugged it's analog output into the Creative X-Fi in the computer, hit record in Audition, loud sounds were loud quiet sounds were quiet. Well, I plugged this MultiMix in, armed some tracks for recording and recorded myself talking into the mic, Audition's levels barely registered anything at all. Wierd, I thought, so I played the .wav back with the computer's speakers, some Klipsch Pro Medias, and you could barely hear me talking unless you turned the speakers up. I set Audition to playback to the mixer, and the sound was great, full and loud. I exported the raw audio to an .mp3, and the levels were so low that the .mp3 at 64kbps was silent.

Strange, I thought. So I loaded a .wav that had been previously recorded into Audition, and the levels were full but not peaking. Played them back on the Klipsches connected to the X-Fi. Sounded fine. Played it back in the MultiMix and nearly blew my ears off (I was wearing headphones plugged into the phones out with the Hdph/Ctrl Rm pot dead center.

Thinking maybe it was Audition, I loaded Skype. Connected to my roommate's computer and through the Klipsches from the X-Fi, he sounded fine. Coming out of the mixer, deafening. I had to turn the Windows system volume to one pixel above mute for it to be bearable. However, the Windows system volume only controls other stuff like Skype. It doesn't affect Audition's output to the mixer.

So I wrote Alesis an e-mail, trying to explain as best I could. Their response?

"I am glad to hear you are using Adobe Audition. That is my favorite multitrack recorder. You may want to have monitors connected to the Main mix outputs for better control of the signals when recording and playing back."

So I plugged the Klipsch Pro Media speakers into the left Main Mix Out jack, and it seemed marginally, marginally softer, but that might have been because it was only coming out of one speaker so I can't even be sure. I wrote him back trying to clarify, saying:

"Well, I guess what I'm asking is that, is there any way to "synchronize" the relative levels of the mixer and Audition? When I'm playing something in Audition, that sounds fine when monitored through the speakers connected to the computer, if I have those levels sent to the mixer and monitor that with headphones or speakers connected to the mixer, it's insanely loud. If I play something from the computer that sounds good on the mixer, the levels are extremely low in Audition and if I mix that down to an .mp3 it makes a silent .mp3 because of how low the levels were, even though they sounded great coming out of the mixer. It seems like the relative volume of the mixer is rediculously high compared to the computer.

To respond to your suggestion, whether or not the monitor speakers are connected through the main out or the phones out or the ctrl room out, the levels coming out of the mixer are super super loud."

He wrote back:

"Unfortunately there wouldn’t be a way on the mixer to even out the levels though you could adjust the individual tracks and master volume in Audition’s mixer until the signal is at proper levels."

So, I've just written back to him:

"What I'm saying is, when the signal is at proper levels in Audition, it is deafeningly loud coming out of the mixer. Like, take a different program. I use Skype. When I connect to Skype and have Skype use the computer's sound card as output, voices from Skype are at a normal volume. When I set Skype to use the mixer as it's output, it's orders of magnitude louder. The mixer's output is extremely, extremely loud. There has to be a way to reconsile this. To get Skype to a normal level, I have to turn the Windows system volume to one pixel above mute and the mixer's output volume is just bearable. If you look at the image at www.pmind.com/volume.gif so you can see what I mean.

Also the image at www.pmind.com/audition.gif shows an example of a waveform that is extremely loud when played back to the mixer. You can see even the highest peaks in the waveform are nowhere near peaking, but when this sample is played back and monitored from the mixer, it almost clips.

Any ideas?"

I apologize for the wall of text in my first post here, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. Also, I realize I'm a huge n00b. I realize this question might be extremely stupid for two reasons: 1. either it's so freaking simple an issue I'm an idiot for not figuring it out myself or 2. it's so complicated an issue I'm an idiot for thinking it could be one issue when really it's 13 or 14 things I've set wrong, and I'm so simple-minded I thought one forum post could handle it.

Anyhow... any ideas?

Hey. A newbee to the forum, but I'm having the same problems. I'm running Sonar 3 Studio and have had absolutely no problems using an M-Audio Audiophile (firewire) I/O unit. I just got Multimix 12 firewire. While it does EXACTLY what I need it to do, I had the same issues as you described.

1. Could not get it to work very well with WMD drivers .

2. It defaulted to Asio drivers and while it works ok, it doesn't have all the input options of the WMD.

3. Also it's very unstable. After a while, it causes Sonar to totally freeze up and I have to reboot.

4. When shutting down the pc, the Sonar.exe remains running and needs to shut down separately before I can power off.

I did call Alesis and they said it was a Sonar problem.

Let me know if you've found any solutions. I'm thinking maybe an upgrade to 5 or 6 might be helpful.


Keecho Tune

wystan
Maybe I can help with a workaround for this one. I believe it is a Sonar problem related to multiple CPUs. My machine has a Pentium D also. The weird fast playback can be easily reproduced after hitting play and stop a few times. The connection to the asio driver panel hangs too. My workaround is to open the task manager and assign Cakewalk to CPU 1. That way, it is like running Cakewalk on a single CPU. In every other way, my setup runs OK, using the current Alesis asio drivers. But I wish alesis and cakewalk would get together on this problem.
I emailed tech support for both Alesis and Cakewalk 6 months ago, received helpful-sounding responses, but there has been no software fix of any kind. I mainly use Home Studio 4, but Sonar 5 demo has a similar problem. I don't have any other multiprocessor-aware audio software at present to find out for sure who is to blame.

Details:
1 start cakewalk
2 open the task manager [ ctrl-alt-del]
3 click on the "processes" tab
4 right-click the SONAR... process and choose "set affinity"
5 there is a set of checkboxes for CPU 0 and CPU 1. I uncheck CPU 0, and keep CPU 1
6 close the task manager
Unfortunately, these steps are necessary every time you start Sonar (unless you can code a helper program that will start up Cakewalk for you with the CPU affinity already set).

Hope this helps.
Bill B.

Hey everyone,

I found this thread a couple of days ago. I've had some issues as well with the MultiMix but I think I've found most of the fixes thruogh this thread, trial and error and (somewhat)Alesis/Cakewalk tech support. I had to buy a PCMCIA Firewire card so that I could use the 6x6 cable, this seemed to make the biggest differece. I know that some of you guys are using the 4 pin on your laptops but I noticed that I wasn't having the trouble on my home pc that I've had with my laptop so, for me it's the card and 6 pin all the way. ALLWAYS check to make sure that the Multi mix and the recording software are set to the same bit rate. For some reason my MultiMix control panel sometimes gets reset to 48, maybe I changed it and forgot but regardless, this is where the trouble is if you try and record and it stops by itself. This is also what is probably causing the playback to go hyperspace, if you've heard it you know what I mean. As far as installation goes, DO NOT hook up your mixer until you've installed the latest drivers. I know that this advice is simplistic and it will not fix all the different issues I've read about in this thread but it has helped get my system up and running. I recorded a band last night in a session that lasted about 2 hours and the system worked fine.

As for those of you that have selected to return your mixers, your helping every one else when you post accurate information with a detailed description of your attempts to get the mixer to work. Your not helping anyone when all you do is whine about how you think you got ripped off. We all know how pissed off you are because we've been pulling out our hair too but griping about the tech support center doesn't help much. By the way when I called Alesis they are the ones that told me the've had problems with the drivers and the 6x4 cables.

Randy, Thanks for the post, What settings do you select regarding WMD, Kernelling etc? I deselected WMD and use only ASIO drivers and am now quite pleased with the performance of both my Guitar Tracks 3 and MultiMix.