I owned 4 types of firewire cards (ESI, Presonus and Alesis)
I cannot say how frustrating it was to get these things to work like my X-station (which is USB)
Problems with: Weird sounds while loading songs in Renoise, on/off/on till it syncs, weird plops/dropouts, losing the card (yes my cable was ok)
Indeed, I found a TI chipped card that served the interface but only belkin makes those for my new laptop.
sweex is still very bad is still my conclusion after buying the expresscard (Belkin is expensive and hard to get).
Not wanting anymore trouble, I also ordered an Edirol UA-101
Unfortunately, USB3 won’t be here till 2010, and chances are it won’t provide backwards compatibility for firewire. So just like old standards like vga, serial and cat5, firewire’s not going anywhere any time soon. Not until firewire devices start becoming paperweights will the standard disappear.
usb wont be compatible with firewire at all just like current usb devices, but it will be backwards compatible with usb 2 devices. firewire, to me is already a legacy port. along the lines of is serial and parallel port brethren.
Which interfaces did you use? I’m really getting confident about the reliability of my Edirol.
Never experienced this solid performance with any of my firewire interfaces.
Macs come with firewire 2 which is quite fast (800mbps) and although I’m not aware of many sound cards supporting that yet, it can be great for external hard drives. The 6-pin (powered) firewire jack is really handy, you can use some firewire devices without having to plug them into external power. (4-pin PC firewire interfaces have no power). That being said I’m a PC user, I wish I could afford a mac though. Even though I’d probably just install bootcamp.
Just want to throw this in allthough I know it’s probably not relevant anymore. But maybe it helps someone else decide about getting a Mac Book Pro or not .
I for one, got myself a MB Pro, and got a little bit upset when I found out about the following:
Apparently the new Mac Books Pro are shipped with a really cheap Agere Firewire chipset which is reported to lead to all sorts of problems with quite a number of well known Firewire audio interfaces, be it RME, Presonus, Motu (they even mention it here [1]). Only the Apogee Duet claims to work perfectly with the new Mac Book Pro FW chipset.
If you plan to do get an FWIF make sure your computers FW uses a Texas Instrument chipset.
Macs have been known to not use TI for quite a few years now. Afraid but it comes as no surprise that you are having problems with a firewire audio interface on a new MacBook Pro. In fact there is apparently not a single laptop in production using the firewire chipset (from discussion reported by a KVR user/systems integrator and a representative from Texas Instruments) which is part of the reason why that, even though I have what I believe to be the last laptop to use TI, I am trying my hardest to avoid getting a firewire audio interface as I’m suer I will upgrade at some point in the future.
When you compare the features and hardware side by side its truly a no brainer. With UWB, USB2, and Firewire, you can use any type of interface on the market.
Aye… when I go into my windows volume controls, under “record” … there should be an input device called “stereo mix” or “what you hear” or something to that effect
Apparently this is a documented issue that may be related to Sigmatel? and/or Realtek sound drivers. For some its proven to be completely disabled. And yet others speculating DRM/OEM/MS strategery to explain the lack of transparency in activating the feature. Any number of things could be the culprit but luckily there is a workaround.
First, I have a Digi002R for my audio interface, and the thing has been nothing but reliable. I tracked my band’s entire album (drums recording on 5 channels at once), and it never skipped, popped, or hiccuped (this was also on a desktop that I built 3 years ago).
Meanwhile, everything I’ve had USB-wise (an Edirol PCR-a30, my old MIDI keyboard which is seeing the end of its lifespan, and my KORE 1 controller) has been unreliable for workhorse recording. Obviously, these aren’t built for the same task, but just the difference in quality is striking.
Finally, Firewire also opens up some of the really fun goodies, like my Liquid Mix 16 (which can be found at bargain prices these days. I saw a standard Liquid Mix going for $400 new somewhere, I’ll have to find that link…).
