Emagic A26 FAQ

Below you will find a list of common questions I have received (mainly for the a62m so far, but I've adapted them). It includes problems encountered when setting up the driver, and possible solutions.

Does your driver work in Snow Leopard?

No, the driver only works for Lion and beyond. The original EMI driver works in Snow Leopard, so I saw no point. If you have lost your disks try Google. I have never had the original firmware from Emagic / EMI.

Emagic EMI 26 appears in the preferences, but the sound doesn't work

If you can see the device in the Preferences Sound panel, my driver is working. How do I know this? The .HEX files you downloaded are the firmware for the device. They do most of the work and are written by EMI, not me. All my driver does is upload the firmware to the device when your computer starts, or when the device is plugged in. So if you can see the device in Preferences then my driver has worked, and your problem is elsewhere.

Try opening the Audio Midi Setup utility (in the Applications > Utilities folder) and choosing 2 ch 16-bit for both input and output. If this works the problem is USB. Put simply USB2 is a pathetically slow interface, and other devices on your USB bus may be hogging the limited bandwidth available just because they were plugged in once. (If you want a better understanding of why this is so read up on how USB2 allocates bandwidth between devices). By reducing your audio to 16-bit you are reducing the bandwidth requirements of the A26. Finally try having the A26 on it's own USB port (not a hub) and reboot.

I have downloaded the files, but the file sizes are different

If the differences is only a small amount, don't worry. There are different ways of measuring the size of files, which give slightly different numbers. When I make updates some sizes may change also. But if the size of the .HEX files vary by more than say 10%, you probably have the wrong ones, or didn't download them correctly. Go back and follow my instructions carefully.

I still can't get it to work

Have you followed the instructions carefully? It's easy to gloss over a step thinking you don't need to do it, or thinking a different method will work also. It may not.

But if you're confident you've done everything correctly, go to terminal and type the following:

ls -al /Library/Application\ Support/JazzMedia/A26
ls -al /Library/LaunchDaemons
ls -ld /usr/local/b*
ls -l /usr/local/bin/A26*
sudo launchctl list | grep a26
ps -ax | grep A26

The first and last letters in "ls -al" are lower-case L (el). The vertical line before "grep" is not a letter. It is the vertical-bar symbol found below the 'delete' key on many keyboards, on the same key as the back-slash (\). Copy and pasting each line is probably safer than typing them.

Copy and paste the results into an and send them to me, along with a description of what you did, what worked, and what didn't work, etc.