Ardour and Alesis iO 26 Digital Recorder

Installation & Configuration Mac OS X
#1

Does anyone on the forum know if there are Ardour drivers that will work with an Alesis iO 26 Digital Recorder and, if there are drivers and it will work, what is the maximum number of tracks that can be recorded simultaneously . . . looking to record our band live on an Intel Mac Powerbook running MacOSX 10.5

#2

There is no such thing as ‘Ardour Drivers’

If the interface works with your OS, it will work with Jack and thus with Ardour. So in your case if there are OS X drivers for it, it will likely work fine. Ardour will record any number of tracks simultaneously, it all depends on how many inputs the drivers for your interface expose to your OS. For the record I have personally tracked up to about 40 tracks at once, I know otehrs that have done 64 and above.

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#3

Thanks for the reply and great info . . . I just discovered the existence of Ardour today doing some research on the web . . . sounds like a much better audio app than I first thought (40 tracks at once) . . . up to now I’ve just recorded our band in the room on my MAC with a Blue Snowball (decent for what it is, but no mix possible) . . . I’m trying to step up the quality/options/mix in our recordings without spending a lot of money . . . so, (if you don’t mind my asking) based on what you know or have heard which audio recording interface would you choose if it was between an Alesis iO 26, Presonus Firepod or Firestudio, Motu 8PRE and Tascam 1641 (they seem to be the most commonly cited low end solutions to recording on the MAC and readily available on EBay) . . . or do you have another, better solution . . .

#4

Hmm truthfully? I am not a big fan of any of those. I will admit a lot of my dislike of MOTU comes from their attitude towards their customers, their interfaces supposedly work fine but I have never been impressed with their software either. I know a few folks using the Tascam, I haven’t myself yet to know how good it is or isn’t.

I can tell you right now in my small tracking rig, I have a focusrite saffire pro40 with a digimax FS in the ADAT to allow for up to 16 tracks and since the v2 of the Focusrite drivers came out have been reasonably happy with it, along with being very pleased with their customer service. If you don’t need preamps(Say if you are coming out of the direct outs of a console) then I would strongly suggest the Echo Audiofire line instead.

If you are tracking live concerts, there is one or two tweaks to Ardour’s config I can walk you through to ensure you use a nice large recording buffer and don’t have as many problems with disk access, but even so I would still strongly suggest using an external HD if you aren’t already.

    Seablade