Problems With Reason 2.5 In Osx, USB MIDI instability with AMS/Reason Options

[adingley]

I'm running two machines with Jaguar 10.2.8 I'm new to OSX in general, but mostly it's been pretty easy to switch over, with the exception of MIDI i/o. My G4 Tower seems to be fine, but my G3 (pismo) laptop is acting up.

I have two MOTU fastlanes, and an M-Audio USB Quattro (4in/out audio, 1 midi i/o) I have all three units strapped into a powered USB hub, and then into the USB in of my G3 laptop (Pismo 400mhz, 384MB Ram, oS 10.2.8)

I'm trying to run Reason 2.5 That's it! just reason, and maybe Absynth2...but primarily Reason 2.5

In OS9 I never had any problems with OMS forgetting about my USB midi items... but in OSX, AudioMidiSetup seems to drop interfaces at random, and it's hard to get them to come back.

- First I noticed that sometimes my USB Quattro Midi I/o would grey out in the setup, and when I'd rescan for it... it would vanish completely, sometimes all my items would vanish and I'd have an empty setup.. but everything was plugged in and the drivers were installed (properly, from my understanding) ... restarting AMS seemed to get it back... But, then I had problems with my MOTUs

- I have two of them, and they show up as MOTU fastlane and MOTU fastlane #2, which is fine... however, when I setup reason to interact with them... I wasn't getting any response or signal from them in reason. The units were blinking in response to my playing the keyboards or drum triggers... but the reason software wasn't seeing it. I'm not sending any MIDi out to any devices... just in to reason for live performance... so stability is critical... and I'm starting to panic.

- So far, I'm not able to get my MOTU's to consistently show up in AMS... if I unplug one for just a second... and plug it back in, the icon greys-out in AMS and I can't get it to come back.... even after restarting AMS... I have to re-boot the laptop. and even when they do show up in AMS, I don't always get MIDI into reason... even when the prefs in reason are setup correctly... every time I change a device name or drop an item in AMS, Reason barks at me, saying that the MIDI setup has changed...yadda yadda.

My G4 Tower doesn't have any problems though... the only problem I had with the Tower was that my Emagic MT4 would stop working when I launched Absynth2, but then I took it off of the USB hub and put it right into the machine's USB port... and now it's fine. So, in response to that, I plugged my USB i/o directly into the laptop's USB port and I still have the same problems. I'm stumped.

I plan to use 4 simultaneous midi inputs for Reason, and I plan to use it on stage... so it has to be stable EVERY time i boot up, or else I'm going to have to find another solution...