5.5 question

[Rich LePage]

Finally got around to setting up Medit 5.5 on a WinXP pro machine, Athlon XP 2500 CPU.

Noticed that the m/media driver is GONE-- Wondered why?
Will one of the earlier ones work?
It is helpful to be able to play out of Krystal for running
with Cool Edit pro (or the Adobe version) when using
their EQ or other processing, to check the quality using
preview or similar in an external program.

Also, the Direct X link STILL seems to not work right.
I cannot get it to not crash. I've been noting this ever
since the link first appeared in Medit -- I was never able
to get it to work with any 3rd party DX plug ins.

On the XP Pro system, I have authorized Waves
plug ins-- quite a few of them. Their new system uses
a USB dongle called ILOK, so that you can put their
software on ANY computer, and then you insert your
authorized-by-them ILOK key and the plug ins will run.

But though they run perfectly with Cool Edit and some other
stuff, I cannot still get them to run with Medit. Medit will always
crash when attempting to run them-- or anyone else's.
Not just on this machine, either-- on any we've ever tried
to run the Direct X link on. We've been trying since way back
in Direct X 8.0. But with Cool Edit Pro installed on the same
machines (mostly Win98 and WinME) and the 5.4. Medit
m/media driver installed, the other programs run the
Direct X stuff, but Medit crashes on every try.

Any ideas of what can be tried? Been asking on this one
for some time. The fact that the other programs always
run them seems to rule out Direct X problems etc.
Also DXDiag has always reported all was fine when
I've tested this in the past on Win98, ME, etc.

The m/m driver would be handy. Presently I have to
use the motherboard's onboard NVidea audio out to
audition with. It is reasonably good quality for an
onboard device, but nowhere near Krystal of course.

Let me know, also if anyone else has seen this or
what's noted below.

Medit will also nearly always over-run on this machine
when you start a session, with nothing else running
or anything. I have seen this with both the Krystal
analog input as well as with its SPDIF in and AES, too.

When you first start it recording, it will run 10 to 15
seconds, then stop and report an over-run.
This occurs at standard 44.1K, 16 bit.

However, when you then discard what was recorded,
close the record screen, re-open the filename you
want to record, and then try again, it will work OK.

This is something I've never seen on any of our other
MTU systems. Anything I should check or change?

Both the boot drive and drives being recorded on
(removable) are FAT32, and regular EIDE/ATAPI drives
that seem to be set up correctly. XP indicates nothing
is fragmented on them. This will happen with everything
from IBM 9 gig drives to Maxtor 80 giggers. I also tried
with some of my FAT16 drives and same thing happens.


The machine is an Athlon 2500 with 1 gig RAM.

All best to all at MTU and here on the forums,
let me know if anyone has input on these-- thx.

Rich LePage

[MTUSUPPORT]

Rich,
I am honestly not sure what to tell you, these seem to be problems related to this system.

I have not had anyone else report any of these problems to me. We also have never tested Microeditor and Krystal on any of the new AMD processors.

The only motherboard that we know it will work on is an Intel D845GEBV2L. This is the last board that we have tested, which was about a year ago. We still ship this board with any systems that we build.

I have not had any of these problems when using this motherboard under Windows XP Professional and using the Intel P4 2.6 GHZ processors.

[Rich LePage]

Hi Bryan,
Thanks for getting back. Any reason the m/media driver is gone in 5.5 -- and any way to put it back?

The Direct X thing I mentioned has been true since it was first implemented in Medit-- on every system I've tried it on, Intel, AMD, you name it-- I never could get it to work right with any 3rd party Direct X programs, despite the same plug ins running fine on the same systems with other hosts like Cool Edit, etc.

I sent piles of notes on that one going way back to various beta versions of the DX enabler. In fact, I bought the Waves plug ins over 2 years ago, specifically to use with Medit, but I could never get them to work with it.

I held off on registering them (they will always run for 14 days in full function mode if you don't register them, but after that will not run any longer) -- due to the Direct X stuff in Medit never working right. Finally just recently I bit the bullet due to needing their de-esser, and they upgraded me free to a current version which allows you to use it with the ILOK key. You buy an ILOK (USB key made by Pace), and then they authorize the key, so that you can use the software on any computer you want, so long as you plug in the key to authorize it.

So, I then rolled their plug ins out to many computers, all of which also run Medit, but alas, the same result, Medit won't work with any of them. Yet most of the machines also have CEP and a cheapo sound card (bought to eventually allow Medit to preview Direct X) in them-- and under CEP (Cool Edit Pro or the Adobe version of it) the Waves stuff always runs just fine.

Hope all else there is going well. If you have any tips or things I might try, let me know.

Rich

[MTUSUPPORT]

Rich,
Sorry I missed that part. The driver was not redone to work under XP or 2000, so this is why it is not there. I would almost gurantee there is no way the old driver will not work under XP or 2000.

The DirectX was always touchy for a long time in Medit so there were no changes made to it. Dave decided not to have Larry dig into it anymore to try to fix the DirectX. This is why there are problems, some items will work but others won't.

[Rich LePage]

Thx for letting me know. Too bad, the Waves stuff is very good, though fairly costly. Guess for the moment (and maybe much longer...) I'm stuck creating things in WAV files and then taking them into Cool Edit Pro or whatever, run the plug ins as needed, then bring back to Medit to edit.

Cumbersome, but Medit still beats anything else for the editing.
(by far....)

[geezer]

...So Rich, how are you bringing the files back to Medit? If the files are 24bit, is there any way but real time transfer over wires?


I, too, am contemplating bringing some Waves plug-in enhanced files back into Medit from Wavelab, but don't see any way to do this other than real time.

This is the same question I have been asking again and again. Can MTU support tell us all about the file header info needed to do this?

[Rich LePage]

For Geezer,
Yeah, for 24 bit I think you're right on that. I usually have
only been mixing down to 24 bit and so I don't process
those files after they're created.

Sorry to take a while to get back, the forums used to auto
notify if there was something new, but don't on this machine
at least.

For 16 bit WAVs though it works out pretty well.
I have done a couple jobs that way, where client sent in
source CDs of long training programs they wanted
to add some new stuff to but original pgms were not
done by me.

One sounded very dull out of the box. I ripped all
the CDs to WAV with M/Studio. I like that better than
other rippers because it is less tolerant of faults on the
CD and won't rip tracks that have excessive jitter or
problems. When that happens, at least I'm aware of
it and can then rip using something else (like EZCD usually).
At least you're on the alert with potential problem tracks
working that way. And sometimes they are very noticable
problems, though sometimes not!

The Waves plugs (Gold Bundle in this case) work very
well within Cool Edit Pro 2.x but have not tried with the
Adobe version though I have that.

In this case, I wanted to pretty much EQ, de-ess, and
otherwise process the source stuff all pretty much the
same, and quite a bit heavier than I normally
would process stuff when I originate it.

So you put all the files onto 1 set of CEP tracks
(could use more than 1 , but no need on this job)

and you can then do processing via plug ins (plus
any of CEP's stuff) real time, which lets you tweak
the same way we all have done analog forever. On a fast
enough machine (Athlon 2500) I was able to run I think
6 plug ins simultaneously, if I remember right it was
a graphic EQ, an expander/gate, a notch filter, some very
light reverb, the Waves de-esser, and their L1 Ultramaximizer,
though likely not in that order for processing.
The machine and CEP never really barked much,
though CEP did hiccup once in a while during the tweaking,
but not too badly.

During tweaking you can A/B, take stuff in/out etc like we all are used to doing analog.

You can also tweak the gain bit by bit though I didn't have
to do that much, it was fairly constant on the source
with some anomalies. (in CEP you can draw a gain
structure, but a bit cumbersome)

Then, when happy with the settings, you mix down each
chunk of the track (in this case about an hour's worth
each time) in CEP, which is a disk operation that required
about 6 minutes to make a new file which it will always
call "mixdown" whether you want that or no.

You save that as another name, and do the next file,
since it will also be called "mixdown" so it will overwrite
the previous one. But to me on that job the big advantage
was real time tweaking to find "average" settings for
all those processers that helped the material, especially
the de-essing since I was brightening the source more
than a little bit due to it sounding so dull -- and real dead
too, but not "nice" dead sounding, if you know what I mean
(likely you do!) In this case the brighenting was more
dipping out low mids and lows than boosting though.

I did some gain automation on areas in the files in CEP
but not a lot, it doesn't come that intuitively/easily and
so unless it was so bad it was gonna mess up the
processing (like the expander) I didn't bother (another
reason the L1 was in the chain, to pull stuff together
better). Where it was too low or high but "in the ballpark"
I left fine tuning for Medit, since it is so much easier.

Then brought everything to Medit, chopped it up and
put in markers for where new stuff is going to go,
moved stuff around, fine-tuned the gain, chopped out
many noises, replaced some lines with others all over
the place, fixed a bunch of bad edits in the source.
(there were a lot of those, surprisingly, since this
had been released previously)

All the processing had (expectedly) brought up some
more noises than you noticed in the dull original, but
losing or reducing them was easy in Medit for the most part.

Next week I'll record the new material in NYC where
I keep one barebones Medit system and bring it
back on a removable drive, and just drop it in and
tweak each area. I might have to degrade the new
stuff some to better match the existing, that as always
will be try and see. I just initially record it flat and
then tweak from there most times, depends though.

All told, reasonably painless - and the big advantage is the real time tweaking using the Waves stuff in CEP. I wish I could
get them to work in Medit, but I've never had any luck
at all with Medit and Direct X despite many beta versions
and trying on many machines, Win98, ME, XP and on.

The other pretty neat thing about the Waves stuff is
that if you use the ILOK key, you can install their stuff on
all your machines, though of course you can only run one
at a time. Way better than the former "you gotta authorize
your hard drive" approach, which put me off real big time.

And they mostly sound good, though I'm still a diehard
analog processing guy for many things. I often process
analog and go back to digital by mixing down to a second
Medit system via a Finalizer, dbMax or an Apogee sometimes.

Hope all this is helpful to you.

[geezer]

....Yeah, I just finished (hopefully) the mastering for a Taj Mahal CD using Wavelab and Waves mastering plugins....The linear phase multiband stuff is very impressive, as is the L2 limiter for the end of the chain.

This was one of a bunch of spinoff CDs from DVDs I've been doing for the last 4 years....All the DVDs end up as 48k/24bit files mixed from multitracks of the same format. It is always a challenge to come up with a good sounding CD at the lower bit rate and alternate sampling freq. I have traditionally done a "one pass" D-A, A-D, hardware mastering and dithering into MTU at 16 bit while monitoring through MTU....This has worked well, but did not allow me to use the plug-ins and process at higher bit rates.

This time around, I had the additional challenge of actually having done all the mixes at 96k in my DM2000. I chose to spend quite a bit of time, therefore, testing various dithering and rounding paths through both MTU and Wavelab......I have, in the past, been fairly suspicious of dithering in general, and have been fairly pleased with MTU's ability to apply some decent math to 24 bit files and bring them down to 16 for CD without dithering.

This whole testing process was truly mind-boggling. I found ultimately that, even though the real time process with the Waves plugins was extremely useful and effective, I could only trust the results after listening to a burned CD through a controlled monitoring setup....I went through literally 40 CDs figuring everything out. The small size of the changes that mattered (often 0.1 db!) was phenomenal.

In the end, I was a little less pleased with the MTU rounding process than I had hoped, though it still does something that no other program does.....The perceived changes in frequency response from the 24 bit file to the burned CD were subtle, but, in this instance, important. The CD did still retain the size and detail of the 24 bit file, though, and some of the ways the rounding responded to dithering, etc., could be useful on other projects.

The biggest problem was that I had to transfer processed files into MTU in real time because no one will tell me how to get these 24bit (actually 32 float, I think) files back into MTU.....A number of users have reported being able to open .sf files in Cool Edit, but no one has told me how to then bring them back into MTU.....This is essential if MTU is to keep any kind of significant place in my operation.

The CD setup in Wavelab is a little less intuitive, but it provides all the options you need (CD Text, Multimode, Hidden Track, etc....) you need to stay totally capable in the modern production environment.

[Rich LePage]

Hi again,
Good to know-- always the best info from you-- thx.
Are you using the ILOK with the Waves stuff too?
I had trouble initially, but Waves' support was pretty
speedy and got it resolved. Worked fine on the first
machine I set up, but moving to other machines
was weird at first. You can't use the standard ILOK
Windows client drivers sometimes-- Waves sent me
to a special area where there were some other drivers
that worked on a Win ME machine I wanted to put
the plugs on too.

I think I managed to open an SF as raw in Cool Edit once,
but I honestly don't remember how (or if) I got it back to
MTU, likely it was saving it out as a WAV in CEP.

But usually I just do it as save to WAV first in
Medit, and then bring into
CE Pro, with disk space a non-issue now
that's just easier.
You do of course lose markers then, and I still use
the file flag markers a lot when I do v/o stuff in NYC,
since that keeps the flags with the file, not just
ref'd on the segments. I usually just have a "scratch"
mix file open in the NYC sessions, thus the file flags
become impt for finding good takes or ref points
when I get it back to the burbs here for all the
post work.

And of course, you can't store file flags in the header
if it's a WAV. I thought about broadcast WAV, but
all the stuff you've written about problems currently
with that is so true and I sure do wish that could
be made to happen. But at least by time I take
the stuff into CEP to process it, I've usually edited
it first that way, or at least done basic assembly of
good takes as a quick first pass.

You're right, it sure would be nice if you could
open SFs in anything else. I had been bugging Syntrillium
about that since they supported so many formats, but
alas, then they sold to Adobe and support is far more
"corporate" now with them. Up through the last
Syntrillium versions of CE Pro, they were still promising
that they would strongly consider directly allowing
SFs as an "openable" format.

Interesting observation about the rounding- gotta
mess with that some more and do some A/B'ing.

I totally agree with your view that you really can't
trust anything but a ref CD on known monitoring.
I always seem to notice subtle changes, sometimes
good ones, sometimes not.

And you are so right about little tiny gain changes
making huge diffs, too. Makes me wonder if in reality
they are as little as they indicate they are - in Medit,
and most other things. Yeah, I see the meters, etc,
but my ears are hearing bigger subjective differences
with very small gain changes -- and that's been true
ever since I've been doing any CD mastering-- long
time now. I very often find myself doing very small
gain changes with zones in MTU-- like .1 or .2 db,
or maybe .5 here and there-- and sometimes
I walk away and say "you're hyping yourself"
but then come back and listen again and still
notice the difference when I disable those zones
as opposed to enabling them.

I know many of the clients never hear the
little stuff I sweat sometimes for hours, but they do
usually comment how "smooth" or "transparent"
the stuff is. And when I get in work like that job
I was noting in the earlier post and hear what folks
sometimes let go by elsewhere, I get pretty astounded.

But I used to find years back I sometimes
was hyping myself when evaluating new gear-- the
out of box thing-- yeah, THAT's better, right? only
to come back later and say WHAT? (Haven't we all
been there with mixes sometimes too?).

So I too am a big believer in the baseline, known
configuration, thing -- also in getting away from
the project for a while and then coming back and
reviewing it. Wish I could every time, but luckily with
most things, I can-- at least to some extent.

All best regards to you and all here.

[geezer]

....I have been told by at least 3 MTU users that you can open an .SF in Cool Edit and Sound Forge (I'm assuming Nuendo and Wavelab, as well) as something like a "generic 32 bit Floating Point file", although I simply have not had time to test it myself........It's getting it BACK IN to Medit that I am asking about. Charles Lawson, I believe, posted a note about a year ago about having successfully manipulated the header to do just that, but has not responded about it since. I have never been able to find his post, nor has the admin ever chosen to respond to this request on my part....This is the single, simple key to prolonging the life of Medit....If I can't get this, I may just shut my systems down and sell at least one of them.

Wavelab is able to duplicate every function of Medit except for instantaneous gain of more than 6 db (you appear to need to process to do that, which is still pretty quick, like in Nuendo)....As I learn to organize myself in the program, it's getting quite quick, and being able to manipulate the volume envelope quickly from unlimited points on the line is proving to be very effective for editing the kind of live stuff I'm used to in MTU.....The way they have "mouse zones" set up in the clips eliminates a lot of the more stupid menu hunting that you find in Nuendo.


As far as ILok- I was told when I sprung for the whole platinum bundle 10 days ago that authorization was better, but I am still in the pre-authorization period. I do need to have this thing on 2 computers (second is a laptop), so if that means ILok, then I have to go that route.

[Rich LePage]

Yeah, getting back in I think I only did as a regular old 16 bit WAV saved out from Cool Edit Pro.
Hopefully someone else will join in and contribute here if they've successfully done it with more than 16 bit files.

The ILOK seems to me better way to go, Waves support is
pretty prompt and was thorough when I pleaded "I don't know much about Mac-type stuff and dongles and keys". The plugs are working presently on 3 machines. The ILOK is about $40 at nearly any dealer, machine must have a USB port to use it of course, but can be USB 1.

I might upgrade to the Platinum at some point, it's a bit rich for my budget given I still use my analog LA2s and Pultecs etc a lot.
Also since I never got 'em to run with the Medit Direct X linker at all.

[geezer]

Slow getting back because I had to get a new laptop together for e-mail and business...the old one had a dying display and was obsolete anyway...

I got the ILok thing together for the next album (Capitol Steps), and it was easy with good support, as you indicated.

The Cap Steps album (very difficult to put together with lots of applause and laughter fakery and transitions) proved the value of Wavelab. The ability to quickly make very complex volume envelopes while looking at the waveforms, even when you overlap clips, makes all these transitions sound better fast....I needed a much smaller library than usual of clean laughs and applause to make it happen.

[Bill Odom]

Originally Posted by Rich LePage

Hi Bryan,
Thanks for getting back. Any reason the m/media driver is gone in 5.5 -- and any way to put it back?

The Direct X thing I mentioned has been true since it was first implemented in Medit-- on every system I've tried it on, Intel, AMD, you name it-- I never could get it to work right with any 3rd party Direct X programs, despite the same plug ins running fine on the same systems with other hosts like Cool Edit, etc.

I sent piles of notes on that one going way back to various beta versions of the DX enabler. In fact, I bought the Waves plug ins over 2 years ago, specifically to use with Medit, but I could never get them to work with it.

I held off on registering them (they will always run for 14 days in full function mode if you don't register them, but after that will not run any longer) -- due to the Direct X stuff in Medit never working right. Finally just recently I bit the bullet due to needing their de-esser, and they upgraded me free to a current version which allows you to use it with the ILOK key. You buy an ILOK (USB key made by Pace), and then they authorize the key, so that you can use the software on any computer you want, so long as you plug in the key to authorize it.

So, I then rolled their plug ins out to many computers, all of which also run Medit, but alas, the same result, Medit won't work with any of them. Yet most of the machines also have CEP and a cheapo sound card (bought to eventually allow Medit to preview Direct X) in them-- and under CEP (Cool Edit Pro or the Adobe version of it) the Waves stuff always runs just fine.

Hope all else there is going well. If you have any tips or things I might try, let me know.

Rich

Rich what version of waves are you using ?

Bill

[Rich LePage]

Hi Bill,
Waves Gold Bundle, version 4, but will be upgraded before long to version 5.x.
The Waveshell is really the main difference.

I also tried it with version 3.x of Waves which was what originally shipped,
same problem. I then went to ver 4 which requires an ILOK key.
These plug ins work perfectly with the old Cool Edit Pro, the new Adobe Audition, and several other programs.

Rich

[Rich LePage]

Hi Bill,
Waves Gold Bundle, version 4, but will be upgraded before long to version 5.x.
The Waveshell is really the main difference from what Waves says.

I also tried it with version 3.x of Waves which was what originally shipped,
same problem. (That version "authorized" your drives) I then went to ver 4 which requires an ILOK key, so had to go out and buy one of those. These plug ins work perfectly with the old Cool Edit Pro, the new Adobe Audition, and several other host programs that support Direct X plug ins. But never worked with Medit.

But if you migrate to version 5 of Waves, you can no longer run the plug ins on older op systems, they require Win XP with that version. Several of my older MTU systems run on Win ME and Win98SE. I have one Krystal in a Win XP Athlon 2.5 gig machine running on an Asus A7N8X system (NVidia chipset), and have made another one work successfully in a P4 2.5 (Northwood core, there are 2 versions of this CPU) system running XP, using an Asus P4PE deluxe motherboard. I then migrated the P4 back to Win ME due to the activation thing with XP. I'm about to take the Krystal out of that system and move it up to XP Home and install an Aardvark Q10 I've had for awhile, for running Adobe Audition 1.5. The Aardvark uses a Motorola DSP like Krystal, and so the 2 cards cannot seem to co-exist in the same machine. It's a pretty clean sounding interface.

My reasoning in moving the Waves stuff to ver 5 and foregoing being able to use them with WinME and Win98SE is that I never could get them to work (or any other Direct X plug ins either) properly with Medit.

I'll put that Krystal in an older P3 Intel motherboard system (which it has run with before and which at the moment runs WinME, so I'll install Medit 5.4). Reasoning is that the Krystal does its own processing and thus doesn't really need a super fast CPU -- also with no m/media driver for 5.5 that will work with XP, that's a drawback. So I figure best use of the faster machine is to run Audition which will host the Waves plug ins just fine.

Also, with XP you can have more than 512 megs of RAM, which should make programs like Audition even more happy and allow for more real time effects and tracks w/o glitching. Audition 1.5 is available as an upgrade version for any registered Cool Edit Pro 2x users for about $70.00 from Adobe.
Running Win ME, I removed Krystal and installed the Aardvark as a test, and had 16 audio tracks running with a lot of plug ins running real time with no premixing - though it did glitch just a little. I'm figuring with one gig of RAM that will cure the situation, but haven't tried that yet. Win ME, like Win98SE, gets very unhappy with over 512 megs of RAM installed. Lotsa weird stuff starts to happen.

I still much prefer Medit and Krystal for most things, but for doing mastering and fine tuning, I will often make a final project into WAV file(s) and then bring into Audition or similar and do some tweaking with the Waves plug ins,
then take those new files back into Medit for final CD mastering.

If Medit could really support Direct X that would often not be necessary, though. And if there was a driver to support playing through Krystal from say Audition under WinXP, that would at least be a partial solution, too.

Rich

[geezer]

....Got to say that this whole boondoggle is what sent me to Wavelab, and I have not found any serious drawbacks as of yet....I have spent an awful lot of time re-examining converters, dithering and interfaces, but the end result seems to me to be a big improvement, and I can work in 96k, which is becoming an increasing reality for me.

The Wavelab process is very fast and intuitive once you figure it out, and is capable of some incredibly subtle and effective editing, but I do miss the simplicity of MTU for some things, including the non-dithering 24bit-to-16bit math for CD mastering. On my last 2 CDs, however, I found that some specific combinations of processing in Wavelab (with Waves plug-ins) sounded better than the straight math in MTU....For some kinds of music, I might not find this to be true, but, again, this would eliminate the Waves plugins which I have come to rely on for a lot of my mastering....I have just recently bought a hardware version of the Waves L2, however, which could change things. I would like to see how this interfaces with Microeditor (i.e.- Master to 24bit with the L2 and use the math in MTU to get to CD land) as another option for some things......The last CD I did that I felt really worked in MTU was through the old I/O with all the mastering external going to 16bit into the I/O via AES, although I have had success with some straight conversion of 24 bit files prior to this...

I have become attached, as well, to CD text in Wavelab, so this is becoming another obsolescence issue....

I am considering sending in a Krystal and I/O to MTU and seeing if they can integrate me a system on a new computer without losing functionality and all my old files.....It would be nice if this could happen with MicroSync, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, my original workstation has become flakey and I really can't deal with it anymore.....Got any solid computers available, MTU?

[Rich LePage]

Thanks for the update. Keep us posted on how well the hardware L2 works with Krystal, etc - very interesting. I've been using the Waves software L2, but of course to do that requires going outside MTU since the Direct X linkage in Medit never really has worked at all for me.

On the integration with M/Sync, that will probably be a tough one, since it needs a m/board with at least one ISA slot, and those are sure getting to be a rarity. I think that once CPUs got much over 1 gig speed, the motherboard companies all seemed to drop ISA slots. If you find one, let me know, I have a spare brand new Microsync. My other M/Sync system runs on an older Athlon 1.2 gig CPU with (I think) an older Tyan m/board. I have another one too that runs on a today-ancient Intel board with an old P133 CPU in it.
It's fine for what it does, which is mostly laybacks to video, though.

Most of my machines have removable IDE drive sleds, the newer ones also have USB 2 and/or Firewire, so I take drives back/forth between them.
But with many of the older m/boards, trying to add USB 2 to them can be
pretty dicey-- most of the add-on cards try to set up a zillion IRQs and just don't work. Ones with the NEC chipset I've heard work better - I tried a couple with Via chipsets and no-go. Firewire seems easier to add to an older m/board, I was able to do that on 2 machines where I just could not get USB 2 to work. You can buy several combo boxes for big drives that support both USB and Firewire, by the way. I've done that with several DVD burners for data and a few large hard drives like 120 and 200 gigs.

I did find a SCSI to IDE converter board that works with most things and allows you to use an IDE CD drive but connected to a SCSI controller. It seems to work very well with stuff like NTI, Nero, and Roxio, but Micro CD won't find it properly, I tried several diff IDE CDRW drives with it.