MultiMix8 on iMac OS X 10.4

November 1, 2007 9:13 PM

Help fix my firewire mixer/recorder - MultiMix 8 on OS X only "seen" by the OS after a cold boot.

Here's my situation:

I recently went Mac (iMac) and wanted an inexpensive way to record a bunch of demos, so I went shopping for firewire sound cards/mixers and selected the Alesis MultiMix8 Firewire mixer. It claimed Mac support (though the original drivers were for 10.3), so I plugged it in, turned it on, and threw in the CD.

I found out later that the recommended way to perform the driver installation is to NEVER plug in the firewire cable before you install the drivers. Ick.

So I installed the updated drivers from the Alesis site. Eventually I read the troubleshooting and turned the entire unit on and left it plugged in, then I shut down the system and cold booted it (not a soft-restart), then the MM8 appeared. It worked.

After I turned it off, it didn't appear anymore. So the only way to record is to shut down the computer completely and turn it back on after I whip out the mixer and plug it in.

Does anyone know of a way around this? I've tried turning it off for 5 seconds and turning it back on. I've tried off->unplug->on->plugin like it was suggested in the manual. Most of the people I'm reading about deal with the Windows side, so that usually doesn't help. I don't know if installing Leopard would fix this or not (if it's even supported).

Here's the stats:
iMac Intel Core Duo - OS X 10.4 Tiger
MultiMix 8 Firewire with 1.5d4 driver and 2.00 firmware.

posted by psychotic_venom to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: I used to have an external soundcard that acted sort of like htat with Mac OS 10.3, and I found that I could get the OS to recognize the card by putting the machine to sleep, turning on the audio device, then waking it up. Not perfect, but better than rebooting.
posted by p3t3 at 11:59 PM on November 1, 2007

Response by poster: Totally worked. Very cool. Thanks.
posted by psychotic_venom at 8:07 PM on November 3, 2007