If, like me, you are the owner of an Alesis Multimix 12 Firewire mixer and can’t seem to get it to work on your MacBook Pro under Windows XP, I have a fix for you. Read on. Let me guess… your mixer works fine in Mac OS X but if you switch to Windows XP (BootCamp) you get… nothing ? Well, that’s exactly what was happening to me. I therefore knew that both the mixer and my Mac were not the problem. In XP, the driver would install but I could not start the Alesis Control Panel and I could not get any sound input in Cubase LE (which was bundled with the mixer).
I contacted Alesis support and they sent me their FireWire troubleshooting guide (link down, also attached to this post, see below). They also gave me a bunch of obviously generic things to try :
- Install every Windows Update.
- Install the mixer’s
latest drivers(link down) (v3.4.1.5782). Duh. - Run Eusing Free Registry Cleaner (that was a bad idea as it messed up other things on my laptop).
- Disable the 1394 Net Adapter.
- Disable virus scanning programs, firewalls, bluetooth devices and wireless networks.
After having tried all that, I still had the same problem. That’s when I stumbled upon a post dealing with FireWire issues on MacBooks on the RME website. Although the post had nothing to do with my Alesis mixer, it did mention a Microsoft FireWire Hotfix (French version attached to this post, see below). I figured why not give it a try. Sure enough, it fixed my problem. You can read all about it in this Microsoft Support article. My situation does not even match what is described in the article but it did fix the problem… Hope it helps you too! P.S. I have an “old” MacBook Pro (the one with the Texas Instrument FireWire chipset). Some problems have also been reported with the “new” MacBook Pro (the one with the Agere FireWire chipset). So this article may or may not apply depending on the model. P.P.S. By the way, I notified Alesis of this solution and they never even responded to my message. So, my solution most likely did not make it into their support database…