HD | Native card not recognized by Catalina?

[gtomassetti]

Hi:

It's been quite a long time since I've been on the forum, and I know my info is out of date. Both the desktop and laptop in my equipment list have since been swapped out.

Main computer: Late 2015 iMac, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD.

PT 20.5.0.207

For the past year or so I've been using my Omni/HD Native in a Sonnet Echo Express III-D Thunderbolt 2 chassis, with no issues at all. When my Metric Halo ULN-2 recently developed problems, I made the Omni my default audio I/O without any glitches.

I finally decided to upgrade to Catalina, since it appeared that the compatibility I needed was there. One thing I checked was on the Sonnet web site, which indicated that even though the Echo Express III is discontinued, it's Big Sur compatible, which made me assume that it would be Catalina compatible as well.

The problem I've run into is that the computer system does not see the Omni. I have a PCIe SSD in the Sonnet which the system does see, but if I open Pro Tools, there's no indication that the Omni exists at all.

I've restarted multiple times, power-cycled the Omni, and tried connecting the Omni to the DigiLink 2 port, with no success.

Does anyone know how I can get things working again, or am I going to have to try to roll back the system to OS 10.13 or 10.14?

Thanks very much for any advice.

Gary

[JCBigler]

Did you try reinstalling the HD Drivers?

My new MacBook Pro running Catalina works fine with my HD Native card and the Focusrite Thunderbolt drivers for my Red 8 Pre.

[gtomassetti]

It's worth a try! I'm actually recovering from hip replacement surgery, which has nothing to do with anything, but it means I still have a few more weeks before I return to work and therefore have some time to mess with it.

[Darryl Ramm]

Frequent problem on recent macOS versions is driver install permissions.

You are phrasing this as Pro tools does not see the interface, my first suspicion is it's not seeing the HD native card at all, it's not an "interface" issue.

Does System Profile show the HD Native Card is attached? If not ignore all the stuff below, you have a more fundamental issue.

If the HD Native card does show in System Profile... then are kext/drivers loaded? In Terminal...

$ kextstat -l | grep Avid

and

$ kextstat -l | grep Digi

(and just see all Avid and Digidesign labeled drivers that are loaded). Loaded requires the attached devices have been detected property (and hopefully your System Report is at least seeing the device ID strings) and the drivers correctly signed and the install approved if needed.

If nothing is showing there then rerun the driver install, paying careful attention to any security related pop-up messages... just blindly clicking the blue buttons is *not* the right thing to do.

If things still don't work look in the Preferences>Privacy & Security>General prefpane and see if there is a warning about driver installs being blocked. If so check the box to allow the install.... you have 30 minutes from running an install for that message to self destruct... so it won't be there now.

Did you do a full clean macOS install?

[gtomassetti]

Thank you for that information, Darryl.

Correct, the system is not seeing the HD Native card at all. In fact, I sent a system report to Sonnet, and they told me:

"We do see that the chassis is being seen normally, but is connected through several other peripherals.

We also see that there are no PCIe cards being seen in the device, which is unusual."

This is strange, because I have an OWC PCIe SSD in there which used to be the boot drive for my old Mac. I can access that SSD normally by clicking on it in a Finder window, or by clicking its icon on the desktop, and I have a Carbon Copy Cloner task that hourly backs up the internal SSD to the one in the Echo Express, and that task has been running without error.

I'm hoping an HD driver install will fix it, which I will try to do on Saturday.

Regarding your last question, it was actually an upgrade first from 10.13.6 to Mojave, then from Mojave to 10.15.7. In the Mojave install, I had no audio issues at all; system sounds and music played correctly through the Omni. It was in the upgrade from Mojave to Catalina that the HD card has vanished.

[Darryl Ramm]

Be careful, if the card is not showing up in the system profile then the driver can't install. If it's not showing up but other cards in the expansion chassis do work then likely the card or expansion chassis is faulty, try reseating the card, try the other slot in the expansion chassis, try removing all other cards, etc. Look at the edge connector and PCIe slot carefully

[gtomassetti]

Yeah, I'll have to shut the whole system down, take everything out of the chassis, blow them clean with compressed air, reseat them, etc.

[gtomassetti]

Because of my work, I have a setup with a 27" iMac and two 27" Thunderbolt monitors. These are set up on my workstation in such a way that I have to get up and look behind the left-hand display to see my Omni or ULN-2. It's not convenient, but I've been so busy with work, and I'm so reluctant to give up a 3-display system, that it's the best way for me to function.

Today, I shut everything down, took everything out of the Echo Express chassis, cleaned the contacts, blew out the dust, and removed both extra monitors in order to 1) troubleshoot and 2) get the ULN-2 that I had sent back to Metric Halo for an upgrade reinstalled into the rack.

Well.

While the ULN-2 was in Florida, I set the Omni as the default I/O, and it worked just fine. Maybe the timing is just coincidental, but it seems that the Omni has died. I saw this morning that there is nothing at all on the front panel but the ring light around the power button. Nothing else.

No wonder the system isn't recognizing it; there's nothing to recognize.

I don't know how much it would cost or what would be involved in getting the Omni working again.

Maybe this is a sign from the universe that it's time to stop giving hundreds of dollars to Avid every year for a product that I'm really not using that much anymore because of my work schedule, and use Studio One if I need a DAW…

[Extreme Mixing]

I think you should check your playback engine and make sure it's set to what you think it is. Sounds like Pro Tools is not seeing what you think it is. Maybe it's looking at sound flower or some other device.

Steve

[gtomassetti]

Hi, Steve:

Playback engine isn't set to much of anything. If I start up PT, it's asking if it can access the mic, and files on a removable volume, and things like that. But since the Omni seems to be utterly dead (no lights on it at all other than the ring around the power button), there's no way to select it as the playback engine anyway.

The Avid DigiTest in Applications > Utilities does not find any Avid interface at all.

Since I'm recovering from surgery, it's kind of hard for me to sit at that computer and mess around with things for too long.

Now that my ULN-2 is back and working and set as my default I/O, maybe I can set that as the playback engine in PT. I'll have to look into that later.