Firewire interface problems with DP and powerbook

jonotronic · Post by **jonotronic** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 6:13 pm

I posted about some problems I was having with a focusrite saffire and DP4.12. Changed to an Edirol FA101, and have the same problem: If I try and play back more than 6 tracks of audio, or try and record more than two tracks it sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies (snap crackle and pop) This is on a G4 800Mhz titanium Powerbook, with a Lacie D2 drive. Focusrite said there was a problem with this type of interface with Macs with small L2 caches (256k)
Is anyone out there running a G4 800 with one of these interfaces (saffire, Edirol, M audio 410) succesfully? Any suggestions, or do I need to buy a new Mac? I do like my G4, wouldn't want to get rid unneccessarily...

thanking y'all

builder · Post by **builder** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 7:08 pm

Do you have the same problem when you record on to the internal hardrive?

If not it is most likely the FW buss.

One thing you can try is adding a PCMCIA FW card in the cardbus and hook one device to it and the other to the FW port on the side.

jonotronic · Post by **jonotronic** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:47 am

Thanks builder, I shall have a tinker and get back to you. I messed about with the disk write size and buffer prefills and things seem improved although still not wonderful....

sdfalk · Post by **sdfalk** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:58 am

Set the work priority (under hardware settings) to medium on your powerbook.
This solution has been posted numerous times, by Magic Dave
and others.

babybaby · Post by **babybaby** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 3:06 am

i've had exactly the same problem, only in the reverse order (got the edirol first, switched to saffire.) and i'm running a G4 1.33 powerbook.

i managed to find a workable solution by tweaking some DP settings as per previous threads (i.e. turn off background processing, play with buffer settings, set work priority to 'low', etc.) my saffire test project currently has 12 tracks of audio running at 96K/24bit, with two tracks of MIDI, along with one active reverb and two compression and eq plugins. running smoothly so far. (i'll probably wind up keeping the saffire, if only 'cause it's cheaper and the preamps are a bit nicer. but i have a feeling i could have obtained similar results from the fa101 if i'd known better.)

still though, i wonder sometimes if switching platforms (i.e. Logic 7?) wouldn't give me better performance altogether. this issue seems particularly common with DP for some reason...