Port Channels altered when changing Audio Interfaces

Cantabile
1

I’ve hit what amounts to an annoying behavior (for me), but I am also curious as to why this happens …

I have a wide range of rigs for various situations, and I use 3 different RME Interfaces – Babyface Pro FS (BFP), UCX II, UFX II – which present similar channel names.

I set up a C4 configuration on the BFP, with the many ports to cover all the rigs. Many of the ports are disabled, and some are intentionally left unassigned – meaning that the Channel has no Assignments. One use of ports with unassigned channels is (as suggested long ago by @terrybritton) to allow recording of portions – individual instruments or stems of a mix – for later multi-channel mixing.

SourcePorts_Screenshot 2023-04-14 152624

I get my BFP configuration all set, then copy it to a configuration for the UFX, move that configuration to another Wintel machine with a UFX II, and bring it up the UFX configuration in Cantabile … and the ports are significantly changed:

DestPorts_Screenshot 2023-04-14 152925

Cantabile has:

(A) added an “Assigned Channel” to each of the two channels in the port, and

(B) assigned Analog 1/2 to the two new assigned channels.

In fact, all my channel assignments made in my BFP configuration – Analog 3 / 4, ADAT channels, etc – they are all changed to Analog 1 / 2. Annoying!

I am curious why these modifications are made?

Also … does this happen because I am:

  1. changing interfaces? or
  2. changing machines? or
  3. changing configurations?

On of the nice things (I thought) about having 3 RME interfaces is that the similar names would be preserved when I switched interfaces …

2

Cantabile is reacting to the port names reported by the New device. Each device is treated differently as far as port configuration is concerned.

Number 1. When the New device appears it craters your logic and auto configures what you plugged in. BFP config will be overlooked and auto configure will set up UFX II or UFX.

The only remedy I know of is to have a different configuration that you boot to for each device where you manually set it up for each device and save it’s settings.

Dave

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