Is it possible to run two PCI-424(X) cards in one System?

[dwire]

Windows would not tell you that it can't find drivers if you double click on the .inf when installing. It just would not happen.

You are wrong Sir. It was a very odd error accompanying it in DevMgr. one I do not recall ever really seeing prior. And yeah, I pointed it at the driver, but this changed nothing (it did not need it) for it already saw the card as it dropped it into Device Manager with the explanation point. You could disable the first card and get it to work, or vice-versa, just not both at once...

When I have the several hours to blow installing and removing cards and writing it up instead of being an A/V production engineer, perhaps I will revisit it so it is documented correctly how it fails...

[kgdrum]

Wow!
dwire I held back after you
apologized re: your OP but IMO you really need to tone down the attitude bro & chill.
people are trying to help you here. Everyone's time is valuable and no one is getting paid to be your personal tech support.
btw: Did you ever call MOTU tech support?

[dwire]

Called MOTU & could not get through unsure why; I'll have to check that with the phone carriers first as it did not even ring in. Perhaps I will have time to try again tomorrow, as someone said it has improved considerably. My last experience was not too flattering of MOTU when their lead engineer (who knows if they were; they said they were...) did not understand what PCI latency was nor what it meant, so between wait times and productivity, I chose to search here. Still shocked it is a question never asked, but the results returned either zero or thousands of returns...

Testy? I have been a member here since the old forum, no idea how long, but no one in all this time has ever asked such a question? Really?

Then I have a person that goes by the username "torrentg" that I am quite certain people that pay for licensing, or make their living from it, work with copyrighted materials, etc. really appreciate, telling me what did or did not occur on our systems and not only making this into something that would confuse most other users, but covering ground I already did and presuming I did not.

Reply one, while admonishing my dismay at the search system, was the only individual to read the question and answer it - YES/NO; I was asking for nothing more that is why I wasted all that print and qualified it...

[FMiguelez]

Called MOTU & could not get through unsure why; I'll have to check that with the phone carriers first as it did not even ring in. Perhaps I will have time to try again tomorrow, as someone said it has improved considerably. My last experience was not too flattering of MOTU when their lead engineer (who knows if they were; they said they were...) did not understand what PCI latency was nor what it meant, so between wait times and productivity, I chose to search here. Still shocked it is a question never asked, but the results returned either zero or thousands of returns...

Testy? I have been a member here since the old forum, no idea how long, but no one in all this time has ever asked such a question? Really?

Then I have a person that goes by the username "torrentg" that I am quite certain people that pay for licensing, or make their living from it, work with copyrighted materials, etc. really appreciate, telling me what did or did not occur on our systems and not only making this into something that would confuse most other users, but covering ground I already did and presuming I did not.

Reply one, while admonishing my dismay at the search system, was the only individual to read the question and answer it - YES/NO; I was asking for nothing more that is why I wasted all that print and qualified it...

Your post reads like a word salad. Totally unintelligible. Also, you won't get much help here with your bad attitude, so I suggest you tone it down.

I don't understand what the big deal is... Simply get up early and call them at 9:00 Eastern Standard Time. Keep using redial until you get through.
I've been able to talk to them every time I've needed, and I live in another country

[torrentg]

I don't feel like returning to the entire thread to read the condescending stuff from someone that used imaginary Windows ("for 30+ years" - so IBM sent you an advanced copy before it was even conceived?) - while you were using your imaginary Windows PC, I was playing video games and coding on TI-99/4a - something that really did exist in 1982 when I was 5.

but if Windows is seeing the card, then you can install a driver for it. Simple.

If it shows in the device manager as you claim - then I have a news flash for you - the device has already been enumerated by Windows.

I never claimed it must work well.

[dwire]

1) Agreed, no I/O is not working well.

2) Winter/spring of 1978-'79 took delivery of a machine with Microsoft BASIC and assembler interfaces run in ROM. How many years is that? Not counting Unix punch cards prior? Since non-linear storage was in its infancy at that time, a Disk Based Operating System (DOS) was yet to come. This was at a time when you wrote the software you required.

3) It was a Saturday when I posted; no MOTU support I am aware of on weekends; please correct me if I am wrong, that would be something worth jotting down. I am still surprised no one had ever asked or attempted to install 2 cards at once, but I suppose it is possible.

As for the rest of what you've posted - it seems pretty irrelevant in general. I hate having to revisit this topic as I already got an answer - it's not working on our system - period. Unsure why I would call MOTU now, that is what we were trying to avoid; it being a weekend and all. I had to make other arrangements to get the job done. For posterity sake when things are slow I'll throw the card back in there and post the results. Considering you are far more knowledgeable with this "high-tech" stuff than I, perhaps you'll forgive me and walk me though the process at that time.

[torrentg]

In Device Manager, for the good card, right click and choose Properties then Details tab. Change the Property dropdown selection box to say "Inf name". This is the correct inf file to use later on.

In Device Manager, for the card with the exclamation point - right click it and choose Update driver software.

Then click Browse My Computer..., Let Me Pick..., Have Disk, Browse.

Navigate to C:\Windows\inf and double click (or single, depends on how system is set) on the correct oemxx.inf file.

Click OK then click Next and it will install the driver.

If it says error code 10 in the Device Manager for it after, then MOTU designed it so that they can not work together. If no error code, then you're in business.

[dwire]

Yeah, that is essentially the route I went, for MOTU has designed their installer to only allow it to be run once; thereafter, you'd have to remove it. One thing that had not occured to me either, is the fact I have the environmental variable set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES - this might explain one thing, for I cannot say with 100% certainty the second card was not as well grayed out along with a yellow exclamation point.

It would not allow me to do anything; right clicking on whatever the second card happened to be did not bring up an option to install a driver; nor was that page available in the card's dialogue box - missing completely.. It had "recognized it" as a MOTU xxx (whatever it says; that's a different machine...) but, it displayed neither an error I'd ever expect, nor was there memory or an IRQ assigned to it.

It is perhaps worth revisiting when I've the time just for clarification sake, but what you posted above, I either did, tried, and/or was not allowed to do by the OS or installer. I sure wish I had taken a screen shots of the card's error info and status as really, it was an odd one; like I say - perhaps it was grayed out and I did not notice? That would explain a lot as I've yet to see that. It was not even a numbered code - that is unusual too...

[dwire]

Had some time tonight due to the holiday and considering I needed to open that expansion bay due to one of the dying HDD's inside, I ran a few little experiments with our secondary MOTU PCI-424(x) card.

By switching the card around through a couple of slots (it is an 11 slot bay, which left me three slots to swap..) I was able to do a far better set of tests on the "no no" dual card setup. After finding a slot the card seemed to wish to accommodate, all drivers installed "properly" and had enumerated separate IRQ's I/O paths and allocated RAM, one first sees in device manager all of the drivers are properly installed; less it would appear "perhaps" a second "MOTU PCI WAVE DRIVER" is missing in the mix. No nasty exclamation points or the like involved. That being said, 3 out of four interfaces became non functional before ever plugging in any of MOTU's F/W Audio Wires to the second card. - Once plugging anything into the secondary card, even with removing reinstalling, or just pointing either interface at its drivers, while there seemed no initial complaint in device manager, absolutely none of the interfaces worked from the secondary card and as such, resulted in breaking all functionality of our original card as well. If you look at the picture I'll try and attach here, I would speculate this is by design and was done by MOTU via the software, for if you inspect the picture, you'll see that the MOTU PCI Wave Driver is indeed gray; --> This ONLY became gray while opening the Audio Console (then returned to its proper state while closed, yet still neither card functioned after this point at all) and from the picture, one can see that regardless of where the Audio Wires are plugged in, with two cards, it not only drops the required driver, but also loses all functionality, but "supposedly" the ADAT sync port, for which I did not test to know if it truly worked, but this seemed entirely irrelevant as one is available for daisy chaining with only a single card installed anyway. No audio options are left for the user at all.

So, indeed the driver and (mainly it appeared from my tests) the MOTU Audio Console application totally prevents the use of more than one card in the same system as seconds after opening the application (mind you while nothing was "working or usable" at that time anyhow) the Device manager refreshes and grays out the PCI WAVE driver, leaving one with no ability to use either card, so in a word, at least with our configuration NO, it is not possible to connect more than one PCI-424(x) interface into the same system; seems our friends at MOTU most likely wanted to avoid supporting that scenario entirely, which is understandable...

Anyhow, your results may very and take it for what it is worth, but I'd say the short answer is don't bother; connect another type (like a FW or Heaven forbid USB) MOTU alternative for any extra I/O you require, or go with a secondary vendor that plays nice with MOTU; something I have just limited experience with as the need for more tracks than we run here, at least for me, has been slim to none; and there was always some sort of quick workaround - far faster than ripping a bunch of rackmount gear apart.


Hopefully this might save someone a bit of time if they were ever to ask a similar outside of the box question and have no luck finding it via search; I think the title might help facilitate with the Google based search engine here as well. At least in our case, this one can go in the (mystery) solved category...

Cheers

[georgewilson]

I don't know about this but if you give me advance info about running two PCI-424 cards in system then i regards you!!And please tell me installation process of MOTU hardware and its audio settings.Web Design Shreveport

[dwire]

George, I was unable to have any success with running two cards simultaneously as I illustrated in the posts here. Keep in mind, we are way up there on the "possible unusual conflict" list considering we are running at least 14-15 cards of different types and purposes both on the MB and off in an 11 slot expansion bay.

What can "sort of" be seen from the image I posted is how half of the MOTU drivers turn gray (I also had set a flag to make certain everyone could seem them as well) There are a zillion and one combinations of things we could talk about, but for us, none worked. If we were to assume that you do not know where to get the new drivers, or how to install them, perhaps the entire affair will be much easier than you think. We had a special one-time sort of light-pipe and 192KHz sync-up situation and had all the gear, just not the track count "in the way we needed it.."

At any rate, before EVEN attempting to install (plug into you machine) the PCI-424 card and then interfaces, you need to go to MOTU's support portal and log in. When you register, even if you register for a Mac and then decide to use it on a PC instead, one you have access, they'll let you download EITHER platform's newest drivers just go log back in. Windows driver choices are pretty easy these days, but pay closer attention with what Mac version you select that it is the correct one for your machine OS X mix-ups have caused problems... Install drivers, shut down machine; pull power cord, install MOTU card, replace everything as it was, plug back in and restart machine. It depend from platform to platform and OS to OS as to what happens next; I think things have changed as to allow you to have installed the card first on PC's, but you'll get errors and such because it will look for drivers not yet installed - and in the end, it all takes about the same amount of time. If your PC or Mac setup does not properly run the gear and either have a MOTU alias or start menu folder - or you are prompted for drivers again, run the executable (Mac installer) you downloaded and run it again. This should finish the job - from that point (unless you are asked for a restart winch you aon't on a PC and should not on a Mac, but don't quote me... Now any of your MOTU Audiowire devices are all plug n' play anymore.

As for your need as I had over the weekend this thread was started, no offense, but just judging by the tone of you unfamiliarity with these units, I'm guessing you may not need gang them as you'd think. Each card will run 4 PCI-424 compatible audiowire (audiowire - not firewire; those ARE different...) audio interfaces of any type at once that means you could run 48 tracks of balanced high quality digital I/O @ 192KHz or 3 of those HD192's and a 2408 that give 8 channel I/o up to 96KHz, but as well offers you three banks of light pipe I/O as well as TASCAM I/O. If you look at their product lineup you'll see the combinations are pretty limitless and while I purchased my first HD192 earlier in their production, long, long ago by these sorts of standards, only once in writing this thread was the inability "not" to be able to connect more than 4 audiowire interfaces at one time EVER even crossed my mind...

PM me if you're having difficulties or conflicts. And Good luck.