Alesis issues

El Director

El Director

Veteran
Just got the Alesis mixer in today. Everything works great, except that it randomly stops recording in Vegas. Could be instantly, could be two minutes in. Not that any of my ADR goes on for two minutes, but still. I'd like to be able to do commentaries and such. Anyone know if it's Vegas or the mixer?
 
I would suspect a driver issue. Things may have gotten better but I remember lots of driver nightmares with Windows. The other thing that could be at issue is if you have a USB version of the mixer. USB devices can't demand bandwidth and are constantly interrupted by other USB devices. So if you have other bandwidth hungry USB devices like say a USB HD that your recording to... You could be using up the Alesis's buffer before it gets a chance to transfer to the HD.

So

Check that you have the latest drivers.
Don't use any other heavy data USB devices at the same time or get a card so you can put the devices on a separate USB bus (I'm not 100% certain that this would work but worth a try if nothing else fixes your problem). Also are you using a USB2 port? Probably any recent computer has USB2 but USB1 isn't a big enough pipe to be reliable. Related, if your going through a hub and it doesn't say USB2 it's probably USB1 and is slowing the whole USB bus to USB1 speeds.
 
To be sure it's not vegas, you could grab a free recording app like Audacity and see if the same problem occurs.

But, like Noiz, I'd suspect a driver or USB issue. If you're on a desktop, there should be more than one usb bus, so try a couple other usb ports. I don't know what version of windows you're using, but if you can get into Device Manager you can look at the properties of the USB Root Hubs and it should tell you what you've got plugged into each bus so you can try to get the alesis onto it's own bus.
 
Thanks guys! The not using USB is an issue as I'm using external USB Harddrives to store my footage and audio. I did find a workaround however, so I'm good to go.
Thanks again!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top