HELP!! Multimix 8FW and the ruined Birthday?

[jrr37]

Help!!
My son is in a band so I bought a Multimix 8 Firewire for my son for his birthday. He has a COMPAQ laptop (1.2ghz, 1.5gig ram 160gig drive, on board firewire) we loaded the drivers and included CuBase 4 LE, registered CuBase with Steinberg (what a nightmare) plugged in the mikes and amps. Now we're recording right?? WRONG!! He starts a new project, assigns all the inputs, starts the record transport, it records for about 5 seconds then stops. If you monitor the mix you start hearing a buzzing when it stops recording. Anyone with experience, HELP!!

[suprstar]

Are you tracking a lot of channels? Does it happen when you track a single channel? Do any other firewire devices work on this laptop? Do you have the ASIO drivers? I don't suppose you have another PC with firewire you could try it out on?

[jrr37]

Hi
He's trying to record 6 channels. The ASIO driver for the Multimix is loaded and is selected as the driver in Cubase. I'll try a single channel recording tonight to see if it's overloading the bandwidth. I don't have anyother firewire devices but the multimix is recognized when it get's plugged in so I think the port is working.
Thanks

[suprstar]

You definately wouldn't be overloading the firewire bus, but maybe your hard drive is too slow, or fragged so bad that cubase is putting little hunks of wav files all over the place and can't keep up.. Defragging could help if that's the case. If you have some antivirus running, disable it, maybe it's inspecting the incoming streams and can't keep up. When you're tracking, check out the cpu utilization, are you maxing out the processor? I've heard that firewire interfaces work best with a TI chipset fw bus, altho I've never had a problem with chipset.. I DID have a problem with a non-integrated PCI fw card sharing IRQ's with something else on the motherboard, which was fixed by switching pci slots. You obviously don't have that option. If you can get your hands on a PCMCIA fw card with a TI chipset, that could be something to try.

I've tracked 8-10 tracks on a little 40gb 5400 rpm laptop drive, so it can definately be done.

[mattr]

It could be a driver problem, an incompatability with the firewire chipset, or pretty much anything to be honest TI firewire chipsets are preferable, but some select others can also work well - combined USB/firewire chip thingies are a definite no-no however.

IRQ conflicts are also a quite common issue and can be caused by devices you least expect - check in the device manager to see if the FW chipset is sharing with anything else.

Out of interest, try running this little app and report back the kind of figures it gives you...
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
...if you are getting high readings, try disabling things in the device manager one at a time and see if you can work out what (if anything) is causing it.

How about the driver settings? Buffers? Sync? Have you checked it isn't accidentally set to sync externally and the 5 sec hang is while it tries to establish sync with an external clock (which evidently isn't there and so it drops out). I don't even know if the Multimix can sync externally - I may be talking out of my a** now

[suprstar]

Originally Posted by mattr

IRQ conflicts are also a quite common issue and can be caused by devices you least expect - check in the device manager to see if the FW chipset is sharing with anything else.

Or just disable every piece of hardware you can. USB buses, network card, com/serial ports, onboard sound, video.. Oh wait, no, keep the video..