MOTU 828x Hardware Inserts through ADAT i/o

Hi all, having benefitted greatly from the posts here over the years, I finally have a question that doesn't seem to be answered already so here goes. Thanks in advance, and hopefully this isn't too stupid of a question.

I'm running Pro Tools 2021.3.1 on a Mac Mini, and using a MOTU 828x interface. I have all the analog I/O running through a TT patch bay, and I have the 16 channels of ADAT I/O running through a Ferrofish Pulse 16 converter, also patched to the Patch Bay.

I have traditionally only used my outboard gear while tracking, but am now trying to set up hardware insert points in Pro Tools so that I can access some of my gear at mixdown as well. My thought was to dedicate the last 8 channels of ADAT for these, as I rarely, if ever, find myself needing to record more than 16 channels simultaneously.

I understand that Pro Tools requires that the HW Insert path go in and out of the same channel. The issue I'm running into is that the Pro Tools io routing matrix assigns a different internal channel number to the same ADAT I/O pair (i.e. ADAT inputs 1 and 2 are 17 and 18, and ADAT outputs 1 and 2 are 15 and 16). This results from the fact that there are 2 more analog inputs than outputs because of the 2 analog returns, which creates a 2 channel offset from S/PDIF down the line.

Now I can accomplish what I want to do by manually re-ordering the ADAT inputs 9-16 two slots to the left and pushing ADAT inputs 7-8 to the end (see screenshot). By doing this, ADAT. 9-16 inputs and outputs line up with each other on io matrix numbers 23-30.This seems like a crazy solution to me. It also means that ultimately you can't set up HW inserts on all the ADAT IO because one of them would have to return on S/PDIF (which I don't have patched). Finally, I'm worried that I'm introducing some other odd problem by moving the ADAT 7-8 to the end that I just haven't discovered yet.

Am I missing something? Is there some better way to do this? IMHO, Analog 1-8 and ADAT 1-16 should be on the first 24, with the "extra" io all together at the end of the chain rather than sprinkled in the middle. At the very least, they'd keep corresponding items on the same io matrix number with the one extra pair of inputs (e.g. the 2 returns) at the end of the line. Is there a way to re-order them like that?









Attached Thumbnails