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I had been doing some research on what type of control surface to add to my studio:

I use a PowerMac G4 dual 867 processors
1.75MB of Ram
Mac OSX.4.8 Tiger
I use MOTU's Digital Performer 4.61
I have 2 UAD-1 PCI cards
with a MOTU 828 mkII

The product I decided to buy is Tascam's FW-1884.
For the most part it drives DP's most commonly used features great, but it gets sticky when I try to use it with Plug-ins. I've gone over all the documentation and of course, much is yet to be desired. (In my opinion, anyway.)

According to MOTU's tech, I should be running it in HUI emulation, that it's preferred.

The FW-1884 manual says to run it in FW1884 Native mode. (I think this one does work the best.)

And I tried the Mackie Emulation, still no luck driving my DAWs plugs or my UAD plugs.

The problems I'm experiencing are the following:

In using the Shuttle Wheel, when using the SHTL key, many parameters are skipped.

The parameters it does snap to respond, in a word, "chopppy."

Surely a piece of hardware this expensive can be configured to drive the stuff I want it to drive, right?

Turns out Tascam's phone support is difficult at best to talk to and Universal Audio left me hanging.

Can anyone help me?
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

Joshua
CIS

Comments

CircuitRider Wed, 11/15/2006 - 12:02

Are you sure it's a controller issue? Could it be a processor or RAM issue? My rig (also FW-1884) hickups a bit with some plugins, especially when I start piling them on top of each other, but I think it's a lack of processing power. I tend to like different levels and types of compression and reverb on every single thing.

Eriksmusicproduction Tue, 11/21/2006 - 10:40

Dementedchord.

Not sure where you got that tascam has orphan'd the 1884, their customer support has always been somewhat crappy overall, apparently since new owners/management or whatever some years back.

the 1884 is still alive and well on their website and looks like they are still doing updates.
Have you heard/know something that I don't?

Been running mine with nuendo 3 and rock stable.

dementedchord Tue, 11/21/2006 - 12:40

perhaps the idea comes from spending time at the tascam users site and how they've been more than merely slow in getting updated drivers... i've also been in contact with frontier (as the original desingner) and the say they'ld be more than happy to update the thing IF tascam will pay for it... they also deny the fw sync issues... and the problems with roaching preamps... now lest you think i'm just doggin the thing reread my post... i still would'nt just drop it... i just think that if they advertise that it works with "xyz" it should work not kinda work.... YMMV

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