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CCRMA uses several MOTU 1248 audio interfaces: Studio D, Studio E, and the Classroom.
One nice feature is that the front panel (by default) displays a meter for each I/O channel.
To connect one to your own laptop you may need to install drivers.
Keep pressing “back” (the knob/button under the numeral “3”) to get out of all the settings menus so the MOTU display is all meters (i.e., blank except when there is sound) except all the way at the right where it displays the sample rate and clock source (“mode”), e.g., “44k” and “Int”.
Return to Meter Display (explained above): keep pushing “back”.
Push “select” (the knob/button under the numeral “4”) once, twist it until “Settings” appears, then press it again to go into the Settings. Twist it through the settings until “Sample Rate” is highlighted. Press it to enter the list of sampling rates. Twist in either direction until it displays your chosen sampling rate. Press it one last time to confirm the new selection.
Push “back” three times to exit all the submenus.
You should never need to use MOTU presets at CCRMA.
Return to Meter Display (explained above): keep pushing “back”.
Push “select” (the knob/button under the numeral “4”) once, then twist it until “Presets” is selected. Press the button to go into the list of presets. Now twist to select the preset you want, then press the button to choose it. The display will briefly flash “Activated”.
Push “back” twice to exit all the submenus.
Software such as Sound Preferences, Audacity, or JACK may fail to output to the MOTU on the first
attempt (perhaps telling you
Error opening sound device. Try changing the audio host, playback device and the project sample rate.);
in most cases simply trying again a few seconds later often works on the
second or third try.
In particular, if your software is trying to use a different sampling rate than the MOTU’s current setting (as shown on the right of the LCD), the Linux system may at first fail to set the MOTU’s rate, but often if you try again 5-10 seconds later, the second attempt will succeed. If that doesn’t work, then manually change the MOTU’s sampling rate from the front panel.
Also keep in mind that unless you use JACK, then by default the operating system will often perform an automatic 7.1 surround mix that you probably don’t want.
One time Matt’s Touch Bar MacBook Pro (OSX 10.14.6) had the Studio E
MOTU 1248 selected as the Output Device in
Sound Preferences and there was lots of latency and jitter
between smoothly fading the volume on the touch bar and the jerky
response of the audio through the mixer.
Don’t.
You bring up the configuration and routing UI in a web browser. Probably it will be password-protected to force you to get help from Matt instead of mess up the studio for everybody.
Either you connect a computer to the MOTU over Ethernet or else if
you have a Mac with USB connection you can run MOTU Discovery.app which
will add yet another icon next to your clock that shows all the
connected MOTU devices and lets you access them via URLs such as
http://mattwright-2.local:1280/0001f2fffe004a7f/#routing
that somehow tunnels HTTP over UDP.
Not all versions of the MOTU 1248 firmware work with Linux. We recommend 1.2.8+1178
Never upgrade without talking to Matt first.
Don’t use 1.3.4+1422 - we’ve had problems (e.g., output channels suddenly changing their numbering by 8 channels, so the old 1 becomes 9)
If your Mac or Windows laptop doesn’t recognize the MOTU after plugging it in via USB, you probably need to download and install the drivers: https://motu.com/download
You may need to restart your computer after installing the drivers.
Also on Windows it’s possible for installed drivers to be disabled
(on startup); you might be able to fix this by going to
Task Manager > Startup, toggling the MOTU
drivers to “enabled”, and restarting.
This page of CCRMA documentation last committed on Thu Apr 27 10:57:34 2023 -0700 by Matthew James Wright. Stanford has a page for Digital Accessibility.