Hi again,
to be able to record audio through another interface and have the H8000-FW function as a soundcard as well, you need to use a Mac with OSX. OSX supports driver aggregation, so within Live, you can have 2 different interfaces, i.e. the H8000-FW and your other interface, be seen as one big interface. You need to name the channels appropriately of course, in order to avoid confusion, and then you can route things as you want.
If you are not using a Mac/OSX you cannot use both interfaces at once. It's one or the other. You can record your sources through the other interface and once all audio is inside the DAW, you can select the H8000-FW and have the audio sent through Firewire to be processed and return back to the DAW.
Another solution is to have the other interface connected to the DAW and at the same time, you can send some of its outputs to the H8000-FW to be processed and return back. In this case, you will have a small latency. Measure how much the latency is, and you can shift the processed audio accordingly in the DAW.
To be able to process already recorded audio… you can do this of course, it all depends on how many channels and what your other interface is. If it has SPDIF, then you can use it as a soundcard, send the channels through SPDIF to the H8000-FW, process them and have them return back. But you can also use ADAT or AES/EBU or Firewire or even the Analog IOs. Anything is possible as long as something can be sent to the H8000-FW and return back. The most "direct" solution would be Firewire of course.
In case you decide to use Firewire, I strongly suggest to get something with a TI Firewire controller as I had problems with FW controllers from Ricoh. In my setup the Ricoh, just doesn't work. Especially under Windows 7. A friend of mine has a similar laptop to mine, with a Ricoh controller under Windows XP and his own system is stable.:-(
If you decide to get the H7600, which has 2 channels, things are much easier to setup. It only has Analog IOs, so you make sure that you have 2 free Analog outputs on your other interface as well as 2 free analog inputs. Again, there will be a small latency, depending on the sampling rate, you can always measure this and adjust things accordingly.
Regards,
Yannis
