Topic: Fireface UCX - no signal on Windows 7 at all, can't figure it out
If someone could get me going that'd be great. I'm just about at wit's end. The backstory to this is in quotes, you can skip it if you want.
Had an Echo Audiofire 4 for years, worked perfectly with my firewire 400 cable connecting to my firewire card in my Windows 7 64-bit PC running Cubase, playback on VLC, etc.
Finally decided to make the leap to RME and purchased a Fireface UCX two weeks ago, and it's been nightmare ever since. Uninstalled my Echo's driver, disconnected the old Echo Audiofire, downloaded the latest Fireface firewire .exe driver file from RME's site, tried clicking it....wouldn't open. Nothing. Tried running as an administrator, compatibility mode, restarting the computer....nothing, nothing, nothing. Tried opening the .exe file from the disc....nothing. Took the PC to a good repair place I've been using for years, they reset some registries. Got it back, and indeed opened up the driver file and installed the driver. BUT, when plugging in the UCX via Firewire, my Windows 7 machine wouldn't recognize the device. Even going into Device Manager and pointing it to the driver file didn't work, and gave me an incompatible application yellow sign warning. So I take my PC back to the repair place again, this time with the Fireface as well for them to play with. They're smart guys, but they spent two days trying to get the device to talk to the computer using RME's supplied driver files (they tried a few different driver versions straight off the RME site too) before finally resigning to having to wipe my machine clean, and do a fresh install. I was really bummed out they had to do that, since I just very recently upgraded my Cubase 5 to Cubase 9, and bought a few new EastWest libraries as well, and just got everything configured right. I came in to pick up the PC, and they were able to show me that the RME was recognized by the computer, so I brought it back home.
So now I've got a fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit, all latest updates, RME Fireface firewire driver installed.
RME is on, plugged in w/ power supply, into the firewire port on the back of the RME, and into the back of the computer.
I've confirmed that the device manager sees the RME device and is working correctly. I set the Sound device in the Control panel to the RME Speakers (I saw there was another RME listed btw, Headphones 7/8). Opened up TotalMix and set the Main outs to Analog 1/2, where I go into my Nanopatch, and out to my monitors (Adam A7Xs).
But there's no signal when I open up any file in VLC Media player (only playback program I've tried so far). It's not just that there's no sound I hear - there's no signal being recognized! No green signal bars....nothing. My VLC's device is set to Auto, but I did try explicitly setting it to the RME Speakers device. My VLC volume's up to 100%, the video file I'm playing I know has an audio track on it, the sound in the righthand corner of Windows is up, and no signal.
I made a whole slew of screenshots to help you visualize this, but apparently this forum only allows one link per post, so here's the image I think shows everything the best:
Please help if you can. This has been a nonstop nightmare of troubleshooting. The Echo Audiofire never gave me a single problem in the 10 years I had it, and this is ridiculous.