Lexicon Alpha Driver For Mac
Ellis Ruan
My Alpha Lexicon gave no signal despite following the instructions. The driver definitely loaded and everything looked good but no signal coming in on my Cubase LE -- loaded Switch to ASIO for all driver and works fine. My Tech level is high...Strange.
Hello,
does anybody know how to solve the issue with macOS Catalina and the drivers for Lexicon items?
I have a Lexicon Alpha and it has always worked well until I updated my Mac Book Air to the ultimate version (Catalina). Since then, I have not been able to use my soundcard either with Garageband or Logic and I tried all the possible solutions I looked up online.
Hello, there is no driver for the Lexicon Alpha as it is a Mac Class Compliant device. A driver is not needed. What I would do in your case is check the Application called Audio/Midi Setup (this is not the same as System Preferences>Sound) and swap between the Frequency/Bitrate. If yours says 44.1khz 16bit for example, swap it to to 44.1kHz and 24bit and then back, this should refresh the Alpha to be used. You also may need to reinstall Garageband. Sometimes the upgrade installations migrating from previous OS can freeze settings.
Bought one about 3 months ago ....no such problems and my comp is old and censoredty. Using the drivers that came with it too. Used to have ASIO4ALL installed for another interface, never worked quite right.
The latency problem that most people have today is with delay in the monitoring path - there's a significant time interval between when you sing a note and when you hear it come back ot you in the headphones. ASIO drivers and a well tuned computer so that you can use a small buffer is the solution to that.
Assuming that the Alpha's driver is well written (and, honestly, Lexicon doesn't have a very well established track record for their computer interfaces, so it may not be) even if you have to run the input signal through the computer to get it back to your headphones (which, with the Alpha, you don't) you can get the latency low enough to be tolerable to most players. Most of the Steinberg software has a check box in the VST Setup menu to enable low latency monitoring. See if you have that option, and engage it if you do.
The "old" latency problem of overdubbed tracks being out of sync with previously recorded tracks has been taken care of in most DAWs (including Cubase, unless you have some really sleazy version) by what they call "latency compensation." This automatically re-positions a newly recorded track to adjust for the latency that the driver reports, based on the current buffer size. It may not be 100% accurate, but it's not going to be too far off, and it's always adjustable.
"The latency problem that most people have today is with delay in the monitoring path - there's a significant time interval between when you sing a note and when you hear it come back ot you in the headphones. ASIO drivers and a well tuned computer so that you can use a small buffer is the solution to that.
This is the interesting to me. As you've said I have a time interval between when I play a note on my guitar and when it comes out of the speakers. Here's my "plugging/wiring" : Guitar->lexicon->PC_USB_Slot ; PC speakers go into Lexicon's monitoring input (the one with the headphone pic on it ).
As far as Lexicon's own drivers I tried to play with the original driver on the CD, it would result in a latency even with the most CPU heavy setting (it would be really ugly because of all the cracks though).
I tried uninstalling the drivers and letting the Win7 USB drivers do their thing, Windows installs the interface, but I can't run anything with ASIO4ALL in this case either, which means that I have to select some standard protocol and latency is still here.
Finally I downloaded the newest driver from Lexicon (its a newer version, I can see it with the window layout), when I configure it to max CPU power, the calculated latency is much smaller than with the original driver, however the signal isn't recognised by Guitar Rig and I get no sound at all.
-->>All these adjustments (buffer size etc) are done when I'm in Guitar Rig (or amplitube or revalver), cos I can only trigger ASIO settings from there. I also tried through FL Studio which lets me select every type of driver I have (standard ones, Lexicon's ASIO or ASIO4ALL; however it doesn't "see" my guitar, meaning I can't record anything coming out of my guitar that's going through the lexicon. I used to be able to do this just by plugging my guitar directly to Laptop's soundcard)
Guitar Rig is a software amplifier/effects simulator, isn't it? That will definitely add some delay to your guitar due to its processing time. There really isn't much you can do about that other than to try to reduce the size of the buffers for the Lexicon driver.
I would expect that the Lexicon driver supports ASIO. Have you tried it without ASIO4ALL, but just the Windows USB driver? I wouldn't expect very good performance but it would be interesting to see if it worked.
Usually when you're running a program that's using an ASIO driver, the way you can access, or at least change, the ASIO buffer settings and sample rate is through the program. I looked at the Alpha setup manual where it shows the Cubase setup.
There really isn't much in the way of settings there, only a check box for "Lower Latency." I don't know how the real thing looks because the pull-down window with the driver choices is partically blocking the screen and it looks like it's actually set for ASIO DirectX, not ASIO, and just below that, it shows "Output Latency: 46.440 ms." That's a pretty horrid amount of latency, but about what I'd expect when using a Direct X driver rather than an ASIO driver. What does yours say there when you select Alpha ASIO?
That's really a Cubase question. In that same VST Setup screen, there's a checkbox "Adjust for Record Latency." That's where it adjusts the placement of the track to compensate for latency. What's not clear from the screen shot in the manual is whether the Record Shift box that's below it also needs to be adjusted. That may be there to tweak it if it doesn't get all the sources of latency from the driver, or you may need to insert a value manually and the checkbox just tells you to use it. I didn't look at the whole Cubase manual.
No, I really haven't fooled with it. There didn't really seem to be much to set up. Once you install it, it either shows up as a possible driver for the program to use, or it doesn't. I recall that the ASIO4ALL instructions say that if you have a USB device and want to use ASIO4ALL, don't install the manufacturer's USB driver. So maybe you should uninstall it before trying to use ASIO4ALL. Then either it'll show up or it won't.
I ran across another alternate ASIO driver ASIO4USB in my search for info on optimizing for lower latency, but I just did a Google search for it and couldn't turn it up. Could have been old information. There's a "universal" ASIO USB driver demo here that you can try. It won't be very useful since it inserts a beep every 30 seconds, but you can see if anything you have recognizes it and if it will give you lower latency than what you have already.
Now through Cubase I can use ASIO4ALL, which causes a smaller delay but still noticeable ; Cubase has it's own driver which works worse than ASIO4ALL, now I'm gonna try to launch everything with the latest Lexicon driver.
Without any type of drivers except Windows USB, with no software whatsoever, I get a no-latency clean guitar sound through the speakers When I put Guitar Rig on I'm now able to use the ASIO4ALL driver (the only one that appears in the ASIO category) and it works almost well. However when I change settings in ASIO4ALL control panel it doesn't affect my sound at all...
Guitar Rig: bigger delay than Amplitube, with the same exact settings on the Lexicon Alpha driver. Also on Guitar Rig I can't adjust ASIO4ALL settings, the buffer size remains the same no matter what I do. I need to find a way to adjust ASIO4ALL on this because it seems like I could make latency inaudible with ASIO4ALL+Guitar Rig.
I think what you should take from this, for your article, is that drivers are really buggy. It took me 5-6 restarts to make ASIO4ALL work, same thing with standard Lexicon Drivers. Sometimes they just don't work, but right now they do, so I'm kinda happy.
To be clear, Cubase doesn't have drivers. The drivers go with the hardware. However, it's likely that when you ran the installatin disk that came with the Alpha, it installed, both Cubase and the Lexicon Alpha driver. There may, however, be a newer Lexicon driver than what was on the installation CD. This is almost always the case, particularly with hardware that hasn't been around for very long. What comes is the box is almost always out of date.
Recommendation: If you are inexperienced with updating Lexicon Audio Controller device drivers, we highly recommend downloading the DriverDoc driver update tool [Download DriverDoc - Product by Solvusoft]. DriverDoc is a utility that automatically downloads and updates your Alpha drivers, ensuring you are installing the correct driver version for your operating system.
Alpha errors may be linked to system drivers that are corrupt or obsolete. Device drivers can be functional one day, and then stop functioning the next day due to a number of causes. You shouldn't be concerned because you can update your Audio Controller drivers as a prevention measure.
It can be incredibly difficult to find the exact driver for your Alpha-based hardware unit, even directly on the website of Lexicon or a related manufacturer. Locating, downloading, and manually updating your Windows Alpha driver does take a lot of time, making the process unbearable for most users. An incorrect driver or version for your hardware will cause further damage.
Because of the time and complexity involved in updating drivers, we highly recommend using a driver update software. An update program not only provides the right drivers that are compatible with your hardware, but it also guarantees that there is a backup of current drivers before any changes are made. Using a backup driver system helps you to rollback any driver to the previous version if a problem arises.
dd2b598166