Handy stand-alone ADAT multitrack

[csp]

Casey,

Thanks for the info, I will look it up during the day, also the caddy mod sounds interesting as I am starting to have difficulties buying locally NEW IDE drives --- last three were 2nd hand from a repair shop.

David

[synthjoe]

You might want to consider using CF cards with a $5 IDE-to-CF adapter. Quieter, smaller, faster at random access, more durable and less power hungry than an IDE HDD. I've just replaced my d8b HDD with such a kit - plus a quieter fan on the Pentium CPU and I can hardly hear my d8b breathing, anymore...

[Casey_Pittman]

synthjoe,

How big of a CF card did you use and did you just have to install the OS like normal or did you have to do some something else? Also how did you power the card?

Sorry for the hijack

-Casey

[synthjoe]

No problem, I'll take care of putting the thread back on track later.
I've used a 4 GB CF, which was more than enough - the d8b uses FAT16 which allows for a maximum partition size of 2 GB. But you can buy up to 32 GB CF cards quite easily these days (for the Alesis HD24 or Mackie recorder it would make sense) - you might want to watch out for UDMA compatibility.

The adapter I've used is something alike those on ebay, again, it might be wothwhile to look for UDMA compatibility even though I'd not pay extra, as it must be a non-issue with modern adapters. It is practically a wire-through connector adapter, no logic involved. There is a floppy drive style power connector on the back of these boards, that's how you power them. You might need to acquire an old style HDD to 3.5" floppy power cable adaptor inside your caddy to make it work, or you can cut and solder wires if installing permanently.

Formatting and everything works just as a regular HDD - however, I had issues and could never get it to work on an old Digital (you can guess the age from the name) laptop. I'd suggest to buy a cheapish (but rather good quality, DMA/UDMA compatible), small capacity CF card and the adaptor - for a ~$20 investment you can give it a go and see how it would work in your d8b or HD24. If that works, you might want to try not explicitly DMA compatible cards to stay on the cheap side when going larger capacities. Maybe it'll work, it does work in my PII Toshiba laptop quite satisfactorily with a low end Kingston 4 GB card.

[synthjoe]

OK, since I did not really get a solution to my problem, I might look into developing a 4 ADAT I/O SD or SATA backed device that would have similar (but probably initially reduced) functions as the JoeCo and should not be much bigger than a chocolate box. I have specifically live multitracking and easy filetransfer to other systems (BWF?) in mind - anyone interested in such an initiative?

[synthjoe]

I ended up buying an RME 9652 on ebay yesterday. Waiting for it to arrive, I sure hope it'll work. I already have a Multiface from RME and am quite happy with the product's performance (Windows has crashed far more than the RME card itself).

It is an old card with no MIDI out, W52 ROM installed. Will I need another ROM for Mac? I seem to remember that chips had to be replaced on this board when switching platforms - but the seller states that he doesn't know of another ROM chip and I seem to remember that after a while this ROM changing thing became obsolete, or was that the HDSP 9652 card?

Any other hints when using the RME Digi9652?