FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

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Question:
Anyone have any experience with the Korg 1212 card as an ADAT interface? One of my clients has such a card, installed in PCI slot 2 of a Motorola StarMax (upgraded to G3) and connected to three classic black-face ADATs and a BRC. Driver and utility are current. Problem is that although recording optically from any number of ADAT tracks to the hard drive works fine, when routing audio from the hard drive back to the ADATs, the same audio appears on all eight tracks regardless of software routing. The BRC's digital routing matrix is cleared, as the manual suggests. Anyone who might have experienced such weirdness, and solved it, would earn my undying gratitude if they'd tell me how they did it. I've talked to Korg support at least three times, and each time I got someone either surly or useless, or both.

Answer:
This is interesting, since the 1212 I/O has no way of knowing which ADAT tracks are armed - and also has no way of altering data from DP. (The monitor mixer can only reassign data from the inputs; audio from DAW software is always passed through as-is.) Several things come to mind. 1. As a troubleshooting technique, connect the 1212 I/O directly to a single ADAT, and disconnect (or simply turn off) the BRC and the other ADATs. Make sure that the ADAT word clock is set correctly (disconnecting the BRC will change the word clock setting from EXT to either INT or DIG; with DP set to ADAT, the ADAT should be set to INT). This way, you can verify whether or not the output of the 1212 I/O is correct. If the output does appear to be correct, then try the BRC tips below. 2. I have occasionally experienced various weirdnesses with the BRC. Often, these can be fixed by rebooting the BRC. Also, try the alternate BRC track routing clearing technique, in the 1212 I/O FAQ: http://www.korg.com/1212_general_info.htm#alesis brc Note that whenever the external clock source has been discontiguous (such as when rebooting the BRC), it's a good idea to re-connect the MOTU Audio System to the 1212 I/O; you can do this by going into DP's hardware Configure Hardware Driver dialog and toggling the clock source. 3. Depending on the cable setup, DP's input monitoring can cause a feedback loop. For testing purposes, disable input monitoring. 4. The 5-slot StarMax computers use a PCI bridge chip. According to Motorola tech support, high-performance PCI cards (such as the 1212 I/O) should only be placed in the two slots closest to the motherboard, which do not use the bridge chip. My notes don't show how the slots are numbered, so PCI slot 2 may be fine. For more info, see the 1212 I/O FAQ: http://www.korg.com/1212_mac_info.htm#motorola starmax 5. If there are PCI video cards, video capture cards, or SCSI cards, they may need to be scaled back to leave sufficient room on the PCI bus. See the 1212 I/O FAQ: http://www.korg.com/1212_general_info.htm#pci scsi cards http://www.korg.com/1212_general_info.htm#video capture cards http://www.korg.com/1212_clicks_pops.htm#G3 Mac disable ATI