Control Surface window with FCP 6 causing crash

[Mitch Ives]

I was never able to get the Tascam to work with the Aja Kona LH. Even when I could get it to temprarily work, most of the functionality wouldn’t work. Both Tascam and AJA are aware of this.

I had to switch to the Mackie MCU, which works fine.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com

Apple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5

[Richard Dee]

Okay – I was keeping the Audio Mixer window open while trying to opne the Control Surface window. That would cause the crash.

With the Mixer window closed – I can enable the control surface dialog and add back in the TAscam and JL Copper gear.

With firewire drives in use (which I try to avoid) I need to use the Tascam (via FW) on a seperate FW PCIe card.

[Mitch Ives]

We could still never get all of the functionality to work. Tascam confirmed the problem. You might want to compare the functionality of the Mackie… it does more than the Tascam when using third party cards. The Tascam is a great unit and works well in the absence of any hardware…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com

Apple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5

[Richard Dee]

Hi Mitch,

I had the Mackie in house for a short time. It seems the Tascam does more actually.

The control surface features that work are the main ones, levels, solo, mute, pan (including leds for pan level), jog wheel, play atop, rew FF, and next edit.

Thats all, but not any of the other buttons work.

The DA and AD converters of the 1884 work however, and the Kona 3 does see them. The VOice over tool used to not work with Kona 2, but now it does.

SOmetimes the faders get sticky when doing a flying faders mix, but seems better when I touch another peice of gear for better grounding.

I am curious to know what other function the Mackie provides, or what else didn’t work on the Tascam for you. The Tascam provides so many features that when working well, is quite useful. I have to try surround sound going from Kona 3 AES/EBU to my IO’s input then out of the IO via ADAT to the 1884’s ADAT in which supports 8 channels.

I have done this with 2 channels on the Kona 2 and it works.

I did like the Mackie’s TC display, which the Tascam doesnt have, but now MCS 3000 has TC display.

I love control surfaces and I think it helps sell clients, when they see a fully outfitted FCP suite.

[Ron Thompson]

This probably doesn’t advance the discussion any, but the enter, cancel, save and undo buttons also work with FCP and the Mackie MCU.
Also I believe the left, right, up and down work too.
The MCU really comes alive when you use it with Logic Pro. MCU plays nicely with Soundtrack as well. I would love to see more FCP/Soundtrack functionality and response with the MCU: assignable buttons, etc.. other than that, the MCU has been flawless for the past 1 1/2 years I’ve had it.
Ron