I can plug multiple HDSP cards into a PC, cable the sync lines together, and have a nice multichannel interface. Unfortunately, the order of the cards from right to left will almost never match the order of the cards in the card configurator. You have to spend a while poking around with the cards to figure out which card will handle which logical channel numbers.

If you only have two cards this isn't too bad. They will either be left to right or right to left. If they are right to left the user of the system may excuse you for being clumsy and just assume you numbered the cards when looking at the system from the front panel rather than the back. Most likely though he will still think you were an idiot to do that.

If you have three cards it is even worse. I have yet to configure a PC where all three cards ended up in order! I spend a good number of hours powering the system down, moving a card to another slot, powering up, and seeing what order I have this time, trying to get them in order left to right or right to left. I have never succeeded, but I've wasted a lot of time trying.

We recently configured a system with 4 HDSP-AES cards in it. The cards were in completely random order as far as the channel numbers were concerned. In part because of this, we lost the order because the customer was unable to deal with the out of order channel numbers! Even if he had been able to deal with it, it makes us look very unprofessional if we can't even "put the cards in the right channel number order". (The customer does no know that we have no control over the order the cards will read in, he assumes we are too stupid to set the dip switches correctly.)

I'm working on testing a system with five HDSPe FX cards at the moment. They are of course in random order. On a system of this size, it is not only embarassing, it makes us look very bad compared to the dedicated hardware systems that are starting to be in the same price range. This can be enough to lose us the sale.

Yes, we can remap the channels in ASIO. But we can't remap the card numbers in the control panel, nor in TotalMix. And the user occasionally may need or want to look at the control panel, especially when getting sync working during system setup, or if there are problems later.  So remapping the channels in ASIO is not a solution. It is at best a partial workaround.

I would like to request some sort of configuration option to be able to assign "virtual card numbers" to the cards, once I know which order they will be in any given PC chassis. That way, I don't care which order the cards are presented to the driver, the driver will have a remapping table that tells it which card should handle which group of channels.

I don't much care what I have to do to enter this channel mapping setup; manual registry hacking, a file in the root of the C: drive, some sort of firmware modification utility, or something else. Just so the results will be permanent until someone pulls out a card or reinstalls the disk from scratch.

The ideal way might be a small driver setup utility I could run. Having it as an option in the driver configuration window would be both confusing and dangerous; an inexperienced user could easily mess up the channel order without realizing what he is doing, and then we get the system shipped back to us because it is broken.

After the setup, the cards would appear numbered 1 to 5 from left to right (if I set them up that way) regardless of how they were originally numbered.

Thank you for considering this!