Any problems reported with Max 5 Runtime and m-audio USB audio?

    jbm
    May 13 2010 | 7:05 am
    I have an installation patch that's running in the Max 5 Runtime with an m-audio Fastrack Pro, 4-channel USB interface, on an 2 Ghz Intel Mac mini. We're having problems with channels 3 and 4 arbitrarily going silent. Has anybody seen this before? Most of the time it happens right from launch, but occasionally it happens while the piece is running. Everything appears to be working normally in the patch when the audio drops out. Just no audio on channels 3 and 4. The dac is set-up simply as "dac~ 1 2 3 4". I don't have access to the patch right now, so I'm not sure on the settings in DSP Status, but we didn't change anything, so it would be running on the defaults for that hardware. We're going to swap out the interface for an Edirol, but if anyone has had a previous experience like this, I'd appreciate any thoughts.
    thanks,
    J.
    • jbm
      May 13 2010 | 9:31 pm
      We've swapped out the m-audio for an Edirol firewire interface. Same problem. Is there anything flakey about the runtime and multi-channel output? The other thing that seems sort of consistent is that it seems fine while the monitor (LCD) is plugged in. In fact, in an extremely aggravating pattern of stupidity, it seems to run fine for a while, then we unplug the monitor (thinking everything's okay), and channels 3/4 disappear. Not necessarily immediately... sometimes not at all... but they do disappear... eventually... total insanity. If anyone has had a similar experience, please let me know what you did to fix it. The piece is installed now, and the public opening is tonight. It worked fine for the press opening. Who knows...
      J.
    • EMV
      May 15 2010 | 10:26 am
      I've had this on a couple of occasions as well: 5.1.x runtime and full version on Windows 7 (running headless: no monitor), connected to an M-Audio Fasttrack Pro USB. Sometimes (not more than once per hour) the audio just stops – no more output until you re-plug the M-Audio and restart the max-patch.
      I have no solution though...
    • hans w. koch
      May 19 2010 | 12:30 pm
      chiming in late here, but i have been running 12 channels of audio from a mac mini g4 1.42 mhz with max5 runtime thru an echo audiofire 12 for long times w/o problems. running the mac mini headless can cause problems, one way to solve them i found was using an apple dvi to component adapter. that maes the mini believe, a monitor is plugged in.
      hth hans
    • jbm
      May 19 2010 | 3:08 pm
      Yes, it really does seem to be dependent on the monitor. Luckily, we were able to hide the monitor, somewhat, so it's running with the monitor connected now. We may try the adapter idea, but unfortunately we're not at the location of the installation any more, so it's not really convenient to try at this time.
      Thanks for the tip, though.
      J.
    • hans w. koch
      May 19 2010 | 4:09 pm
      or, as an alternative method, you can solder a simple resistor on a dvi2vga adapter as described here: http://mythic-beasts.com/support/macminicolo_howto.html
      but in my last installation, i was running the mini successfully without any adaptor - couldn´t figure out why it worked (osx 10.4.11), but it did.
      h