Q: I’d like to run my ADATs from their front panel or the LRC and use the MTP/AV as a stand-alone MIDI patch bay, but when the MTP/AV is on, it won’t let the ADAT controls work. The ADATs rarely “Self-lock” (tape and timers run, but the dot between minutes and seconds rarely appears and audio will not play). How can I get the MTP/AV to “let go” of the ADATs?
A: Unfortunately, you can’t. This is simply a limitation of the ADAT sync standard. Regardless of whether the Sync Master is an MTP/AV or an Alesis BRC, once an ADAT is a sync slave to another device, front panel control of the slave is lost.
Q: My LRC, which I have plugged in to the Pedal B jack on the MTP/AV doesn’t work right. It will only fast forward or rewind about 5 seconds, then it stops. Got any suggestions?
A: When connecting your LRC to the MTP/AV via the Pedal B jack, the LRC becomes an MMC device, as opposed to a direct transport control. Since the MMC standard only works with Locate points, MOTU had to create a (somewhat) arbitrary locate point of 10-second intervals for Fast Forward and Rewind functions. The 10-second FF/RW interval with the LRC is described in page 62 of the MTP/AV manual for Windows, and on page 100 of the MTP/AV manual for Mac.
Q: I understand there are operating system upgrades available for the Roland VS-880 and VS-1680. How do I go about getting these done?
A: The operating system upgrades (as of this writing, v3.1 for the VS-880 and v1.021 for the VS-1680) are available free of charge from Roland’s Web site. (You can find it at “www.rolandus.com”). Keep in mind that you will need a MIDI sequencer in your computer capable of reading SMF to load it into the 880 or 1680. The instructions are contained in the download as a .txt file. By the way, v3.1 is required to use the VSCD-R option to burn your own CDs directly from the VS-880.
Q: I had a problem with my Akai MPC-2000 and now it will not boot from the internal Flash ROM. When I try to copy the operating system from the floppy, I get an error message. Any ideas?
A: Yes. The MPC-2000 appears to treat the Flash ROM as a disk drive in this particular case and if it cannot read the O/S, it considers the “drive” to have bad format information. If the Flash ROM itself is not damaged, you can re-load the O/S by first booting from floppy disk and then going into Disk Utilities and selecting Format Flash ROM. A point to remember is that booting from Flash ROM only works on machines with O/S v1.3 and above.
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