I'm an unfortunate owner of Alesis ADAT edit pci card that offers a 8 channel optical ADAT in and out connectors and a ADAT tape recorder control port.

The card appears to have a some kind of XILINX chipset (XC4013XL)

couple of a years ago I contacted Alesis about W2K drivers and the response was that there will not be W2K drivers available - ever. The reason that they gave me was that the card itself would need complete refactoring.

What I am actually looking for? Well - I would need either

1. A Linux driver for that card (I'm running RH FC2 kernel 2.6.9-1.6_FC2) if there's one available. Does anyone have experience about this card in Linux?

2. Some other way of extracting 20GB of recorded material to my computer hard drive from Fostex VF160 digital (HD) recorder. The recorder offers three possible ways of saving/extracting material in separate tracks. I should use the ADAT interface (this I would prefer), I should use external SCSI ZIP drive (this I have not been able to locate anywhere anymore althought I have sold those five years ago-) or then I can save the tracks to the CD-R/RW disk but its in proprietary disk system format (Fostex FDMS-3). I have also tried a ripper, but it is unfortunately for a older disk format.

Any suggestions and help in the matter is greatly appreciated. At the moment my recorder stands unused and I really hate editing anything with it. For mobile recordings it is awesome. Also I have filled it with multitrack recordings that I really need to extract.

Best Regards:
Exitium

Hello

I've been in a similiar situation and there are a few possibilities that I am aware of. (none of which are all that appealing) The easiest would be to simply dig up an old win98 box and install the free software from the Alesis web site and use your ADAT/Edit card. It will work and allow you to move the files off of your tapes. A more elegant and EXPENSIVE possibility is to get the MOTU 828mkII interface which has the ADAT sync and and opticals. I've used this device with ADATs with great success. Hope this was helpful to you!

Cheers,

Cheeze