Trouble adding all 18 input buses

Cubase
1

Hi,
short story: I cannot add all 18 input buses of my Alesis mixer in the VST connections dialog. After adding eight buses Cubase refuses to add more. Please help. thx.

Long version:
I 'm using an Alesis MultiMix 16 USB 2.0 as Audio In/Out device with Cubase LE 7 (Windows 8.1). I successfully installed the drivers and in Devices->Device Setup I can see the “Alesis USB Audio System” listed under “VST Audio System”. I can also see all 20 ports supported by the Alesis device listed in the Ports table (16 input ports - one per mixer channel, a stereo sum input and a stereo sum output port). All ports have the “Visible” checkbox checked.

In the VST Connections - Inputs dialog I can see that all presets automatically generated by Cubase are combinations of Mono and Stereo inputs summing up to 18 channels. Whatever preset I try to take will end up with only 8 individual channels, no matter what combination of Mono or Stereo I try. So the maximum fun I can get is 4 Stereo input buses or 8 Mono input buses. Trying to add buses manually yields the same result. Cubase refuses to add buses after a total of 8 input buses is reached. I can freely assign any of the 18 input ports to any of the limited number of buses, so it’s obviously not a matter of ports not active or not visible. I just cannot add as many buses as there are input ports available. As far as I know, LE 7 supports 16 simultaneous input buses, so it’s probably not a matter of limitation of the LE version. What’s wrong here?

This behavior has sort of a sad track record - it seemed to become worse over time: When I purchased my Alesis Multimix USB 2.0 a year ago, it came with Cubase LE version 4.0. I installed the drivers and LE 4 on my Windows 7 machine and everything went OK - I could add 18 buses. A couple of months ago I switched to a new computer with Windows 8. On this machine Cubase LE 4 did only allow to add 14 (instead of 18) buses of the 18 available input ports. Yesterday I installed Cubase LE 7 yielding the phenomenon described above: Only 8 ports available. What’ responsible for this shortage of buses going from 18 over 14 to 8 with increasing Cubase LE / Operating System versions???

Thanks very much for your help

2

Hi griestopf: Just curious–Have you tried Cubase 7 yet :question:

Jack :smiley:

3

Have you looked in the specs for LE7 to see how many inputs it supports?
One would think they limit a lot of stuff like that so you’ll want to upgrade to the full version. I don’t expect much out of mine, It was free, A real DAW costs $$$

4

Thanks for your answers. A already suspected this to be a limitation of the LE version. I just couldn’t find any spec clearly saying: “Cubase LE only supports 8 input buses”. And I also couldn’t believe that Steinberg cut the limit from 16 input buses in LE4 to 8 input buses in LE7. But that’s the explanation. Guess how I found out: I bought Cubase Elements and was able to connect all my 18 input ports to buses…

5

Its a long time since the last message but just wanted to mention that I also have an Alesis Multimix 16 which worked fine with the older versions of LE but is now crippled on LE8 with an apparent input port restriction of 8 channels. I have searched the LE8 documentation and there is no mention about input bus limitations and I cant see anything obvious on the Steinberg website. Should I upgrade or just go to Reaper? I don’t use Cubase very often so it does seem about the right time to leave. Back in the day I used to have the full version of Cubase but after one or two upgrades at about £200 a time it just was not cost effective for me as I do not make any money from production - its just a hobby/fascination.

6

You should upgrade and additionally buy two more copies of Cubase Pro.