console – DavidCraddock.net

So I got given a Digi 002 console version, which looks like this:

Digi 002 Console

A fairly old style digital audio interface and mixer, which was all the rage back in 2002 when it first came out, but now is often found sitting in the skip. Why? Because it is a Pro-Tools inteface, and Avid stopped supporting it about 5 years ago, so it won’t actually work under Pro Tools and Windows 10 (believe me, I’ve tried!). It only works as a recording interface through Pro Tools, so you can’t just connect it via firewire to your PC and expect it to work.

It does have a stand-alone mode though, which allows you to use it as an analogue mixer, and that is pretty useful in itself if you want to drive monitors or record things from the master out. However after digging around on internet forums for a while, I figured out a way of actually using it as a recording interface! This is through use of the ADAT output, allowing you to plug it into a ADAT capable soundcard and record seperate channels over optical.

Caveats: it has to be 44.1khz sample rate, and you still have to use the Digi 002’s analogue to digital coverters in the chain, which are pretty old now!

If you’re willing to live with this, and I was considering what the console cost me, you get an extra 8 audio input channels in your soundcard! Well worth the effort I’d say.

To set it up with my Focusrite Sapphire 24 Pro, I followed the following advice from the Focusrite forum. This should work on most of the Sapphire range of soudcards.

There is a problem I frequently encouter on Redhat/Fedora/CentOS systems with the output of the ls command. Under those distributions, the default setup is to display directories in a very dark colour. If you usually use a white foreground and a black background on your terminal client (such as Putty) then you will struggle to read the names of the directories under Redhat-based distributions.

There are two soloutions that I have used:

1. Change the colour settings in Putty

If you use Putty, ticking ‘Use System Colours’ here changes the “white foreground, black background” default into a “white background, black foreground”. This way you can at least read the console properly, good for a quick fix. You can also save these settings in putty to be the default for the host that you are connecting to, or even all hosts.

2. Change the LS_COLORS directive temporarily in the shell.

Alternatively, you can ask the ls command to display directories and other entries in colours that you specify. You could add these lines to the bottom of your .bashrc to make these changes permanent, or if you are using a shared machine, just copy and paste the following lines into the terminal and they will change the colours to a reddish more visable set, until you logout. :

alias ls='ls --color' # just to make sure we are using coloured ls
LS_COLORS='di=94:fi=0:ln=31:pi=5:so=5:bd=5:cd=5:or=31:mi=0:ex=35:*.rpm=90'
export LS_COLORS

(Original source for this particular LS_COLORS combo: http://linux-sxs.org/housekeeping/lscolors.html)

Tag: console

ADAT with Digi 002 Consoles – Don’t throw them away just yet!

Directory names not visable under ls? Change your colours.