Can't start Audacity with Alesis mixer, please help!

[knibbeje]

Hi,
I was hoping so that I could use audacity to record more than 1 simultaneous tracks with a Alesis Firewire 12 mixer. I have searched these forums and other users have responded that this indeed works. Here is the issue:

I have a HP Pavilion DV4269US laptop with Pentium M 1.7 processor, 1.5Gigs of Ram, 7200rpm 100 GB hard drive running XP with all the proper updates etc.

I'm using the motherboard built-in firewire and the latest drivers from Alesis for the firewire device.

The device shows up properly and i can configure the control panel for the Alesis device to assign feeds to the available input and outputs from the board.

So in the Alesis control panel is has 'windows direct sound' channels that can be assigned and they are numbered. I've assigned just the first 4 inputs to the first 4 channels on the mixer (4 mics)

In the sound control panel for windows I have recording device set to Alesis Firewire audio and playback set to the onboard computer sound (SoundMax)

Then I try in the prefernces of Audacity (I've tried this in both 1.2.6 and the latest beta version of 1.3) to change the device input for recording to alesis firewire and I've tried recording just the first channel or recording all 4 channels and audacity just hangs.

If I turn off the firewire mixer, audacity will respond again. It is as if there is conflict in getting access to the firewire channels and audacity is getting stuck. If the firewire is on and I load audacity with the settings set this way then audacity won't load the welcome screen won't even show, then when I turn off the mixer it unhangs, audacity loads normally, then I have to turn the mixer back on again. When the mixer is on I can see the preview pane for the microphone input and the sound is registering with audacity on the view meters. If I hit record audacity locks completely and I have to do a hard kill of the program (even if only recording one channel)

I have only 2 options in the preferences of audacity for recording device, MME and Direct sound. I'm assuming I need the direct sound. I was looking for something else since I see when the Alesis drivers installed they did install ASIO support and others on the forum said that since ASIO support is provided by ALesis that this is what allows Alesis mixers to do multitrack recording when other mixers won't.

I can't believe it is a problem with insufficient resources, CPU, Memory etc, it seems the audacity can't open or release the audio channels/firewire channels.

Thanks for any advice you can give
Jeff

[steve]

Audacity does not have ASIO support as standard due to licensing restrictions.

I don't have an Alesis Firewire 12 to test, though I seem to recall other users on the forum reporting that it works with Audacity 1.3.
It is common in Audacity for it to be necessary to record ALL channels in order to get multi-channel recording to work (then delete any unused channels), so try setting the number of channels to 12.