I bought a second laptop to take on tour as a backup in case first one dies. The new one has Mountain Lion installed. However, it turns out that there is a nasty problem where you cannot control the order of physical devices for an aggregate device and my MOTUs are showing up in the wrong order on my second laptop.

Although I just found out that I may be able to deal with this by editing the underlying plist file for the audio devices, I’d like to have a way to easily remap an entire set of inputs and outputs without having to do it manually from the I/O mappings stuff in DSP Status.

I’m assuming that the way to do this is with adstatus but it’s not at all obvious how to do it without having to create an object for each output.

Alternatively, I’ve observed that when I change the mappings, they persist so there must be a file that I could get at, copy/edit and then put on the other machine

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

(Edit: changing underlying plist didn’t seem to work)

I have a large number of [dac] objects around the place (often getting instantiated on the fly, initialized to outputs depending on what’s using them). Fortunately, those outputs are “logical” numbers although by default mapped to “physical” numbers. So changing the map is the only solution I’ve got at this point.

More importantly, this particular issue is one of configuration to address differences in hardware, not something that should be part of any patch. If this problem was addressed within patchers, then the same patchers would not work properly on different hardware.

For this particular issue, the fact that Max supports the extra level of indirection down at the [dac~] level addresses the problem completely. The I/O Mapping is exactly what’s needed. Changes in I/O mapping are stored with the global Max environment on each machine and that’s the right place for this kind of thing.

I suspect the Max developers must have been very familiar with David Wheeler’s aphorism.

-A

Everything worked perfectly fine when testing with a single MOTU device in my office, it was only when I connected it up to my keyboard rig where there are two MOTUs chained together that I encounted this — who would have thought their aggregation stuff broke!

By the way, nice writeup of your work with Herbie.