Baby steps...

[Norton72]

Finally got my Alesis Multimix 12 Firewire Friday night. After much consideration, I settled on Reaper for my software. I was up late Friday night and Saturday night and finally got them working together on Sunday morning. I'm learning a lot, have learned some about setting buffer sizes. The default was 256 I think, but that seemed to be too low for some recording. 512 seems to make it happy. I have 4GB of RAM, and was expecting to be able to use a lower buffer setting. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. I was hoping to do a cover of Let It Be real quick with just piano and vocals but I learned something else. I haven't played live or with a metronome in years, and it seems my musicianship is the weak point now. So, practice, practice, practice.

Oh, and I have EZDrummer now, so I'll play with that this evening.

edited to say:

Originally Posted by Norton72

I have 4GB of RAM, and was expecting to be able to use a lower buffer setting.

... but since I don't know what a "good" low buffer rate is anyway, maybe these are okay?

[peteycaster]

Welcome to the forum. This is a good place to come to for help as there are lots of people on here who are helpful without being critical in a bad way. Look forward to hearing some of your stuff.

[woodman]

Sounds like you're off to a good start!

[Norton72]

Well, one of the biggest problems I was having get all this working was that every time I would open Reaper, I would get an error message that said there was an error opening my audio hardware, and did I want to open audio configuration -- something like that. (Options>Preferences>Audio) I knew the settings were right, but I would open it up anyway, check everything and then close it. But the message would keep popping up periodically. Eventually I got it worked out, but I can't say exactly what it was that worked. I put in a lot of hours Saturday and Sunday, so my brain was kind of fuzzy. But what I think it may have been was that at first I was not observing the proper order of start-up and shut-down. Apparently the MM12 is anal about that. For start-up, you have to first connect all peripherals to the MM12, then turn the MM12 on, wait a minute, the turn on the computer. Before you can shut the MM12 off, you have to first shut down Reaper, shut down the computer, then shut down the MM12.

Anyway, I worked all day yesterday with no issues. Today I installed the EZDrummer plug-in, and that error message popped up again. EZD was working well, but after installing a couple of extension, it started crashing my computer, started working sporadically after recovering, and now I get the error message constantly, and I can't even listen to a click track out of Reaper. I'm through for the night. I guess tomorrow I'll uninstall EZD and get Reaper working right again, then reinstall EZD without so many extensions.

I forgot to mention... I have read that these Alesis MM units can be picky about the firewire card. Saturday I ordered a firewire card with the Texas Instruments chip that Alesis apparently prefers. It should be here in the next day or two. I'm hoping that will do the trick.

[DonMI6]

Originally Posted by Norton72

...but I learned something else. I haven't played live or with a metronome in years, and it seems my musicianship is the weak point now. So, practice, practice, practice.

Mate, I've just started doing some recording as well, & can absolutely relate to this. The other thing I've noticed is, I'm ALWAYS out of tune, it's horrible.