ENTTEC Pro access denied?

[dl7und]

Hello,

I just stumbled upon Vixen, looking for DMX software that allows syncing to audio. I use an ENTTEC DMX USB Pro and got it set up to the correct port, but when I want to play a scene I get the message "Enttec DMX USB Pro: (Router - Startup) Access Denied Port 'COM7'".

The interface works with other software, so that part should be OK. Has anyone an idea why this happens? This happens on Windows 7, if that makes a difference.

[budude]

Vixen gets touchy about COM port access - Try quitting Vixen, unplugging Enttec, making sure no background Vixen are running using Task Manager, plug in the Enttec - make sure Windows says it's there and then start Vixen. You definitely can't plug/unplug the dongle while Vixen is running or you will get that error.

Welcome to DIYC btw!

[dl7und]

Hello Brian,

Thank you for your reply and the welcome! Vixen looks like a very interesting piece of software, but it apparently does not like me. Following your advice, I tried (un)plugging the interface and starting/stopping the software, but the result is always the same. Just for the sake of completeness I replugged the interface with Vixen running, which throws a different error. So at least on this machine that procedure does not help...

[mschell]

Are you running anything else on the same PC that is trying to talk to the COM port that the Enttec is using? Vixen likes to "own" the port, and if something else is connected, it will give you the error message you listed.

[budude]

You might want to try running Vixen as administrator since you're using Win7 - perhaps you have permissions set up differently for some reason (I don't have to do this on my Win7 boxes).

[dl7und]

Yes, I have noticed that some DMX software does need admin rights to run properly - although it seems that only the interface driver requires this. Already tried that... And while I have installed a few other DMX programs for testing, only one is running at a time...

But I got a new error message: I created a simple sequence with just a ramp up and a ramp down and got about one second into it before Vixen complained that the source port (I'd rather say "source packet") was not long enough and told me to check "srcIndex" and the length, as well as the lower limit. (Sorry, this is a Chinese Windows, and one reason I hate it is that they got some translations wrong when Win95 came out and are keeping them ("compatibility"?) until today...)

[michaelc]

The other thing to check is your vixen settings. For the ENTTEC PRO modules you do not want DMX streaming to start. Under the Add-Ins menu be sure the that DMX add-in is NOT checked. You do NOT want to start the DMX stream upon vixen startup.

[dl7und]

Thanks for the hint with DMX streaming, it seems to make a small difference - now I get the srcIndex error message... But I also have good news (so to say): Since I do not have access to another Windows version, I installed Linux in Virtualbox on that machine and then installed Vixen on Linux, following this tutorial. Due to multiple emulations audio fails, so a sequence with audio assigned ends in bright light and nothing else happening, but without audio Vixen works just fine in an emulated Windows XP environment.

So, it looks like this problem is related to the way Windows 7 handles COM ports...