Ableton Forum

I'm not seeing any new ones with IEEE 1394, is it just me?

USB 3.0 is out!

Anubis wrote:USB 3.0 is out!

ah HA! so... what audio/midi interfaces use it?

[edit] looks like none, yet, judging from google results.

Anubis wrote:USB 3.0 is out!

USB 3.0 or 4.0 or 5.0 will be always mediocre compared to firewire (including a further development of firewire here!!! that sadly because of the poor implemention in PCs want probably happen ) because the core is already bad...

it is a bus system, different data can only 'flow' after each other... not like in firewire simultaneously. (sorry for the noob explanation, but USB is shit, supposedly being fast or not, well usb 2.0 is only faster on a piece of paper in comparison to firewire 400)

and yes, i don't understand that at all that PCs only have a 4pin firewire connex, if at all... lenovo still does them a lot though (and already USB 3.0 for the fans of it) and i think sony, too?

still the majority of real professional sound cards run via firewire (for a reason!) and damn PC laptops suck in that department and the fact they can run only windows or linux, though.

and i think no audio interface absolute none does use usb 3.0 yet.

moves off topic a bit, though... but if lenovo's could run OSX, i would straight jump onto them... great, great pieces of hardware (well they are as and even more expensive as macs, but they are built like russian tanks and still have so much professional connex, etc.they are not rain proof, but can take a few drops, humidity and dust, etc. much better then most others... real work horses.)

You can get a PCMCIA (or what ever that is) firewire card! Solving device conflicts is what you PC fanboys like, right?

Seriously just get a mac! [/trolling]

Or you can just use PCMCIA sound cards - as PCMCIA runs circles around both Firewire and USB

Firewire implementation is poor in Pc laptops and in Macbooks with LSI/Agere chipsets. Both are cheap as chips and not designed for pro audio, although Mac vendors have mostly at least made some attempt to workaround it so it's not completely crap (still poor compared to TI, especially for higher I/O channel needs). Macbooks do at least have a 6 pin FW port, which is usually more stable and reliable than a 4 pin mini FW as in PC laptops.

USB 3.0 and lightchannel or whatever it is called are fighting a format war too, like beta vs vhs or dvd-hd vs blu-ray, it's not definite that USB 3.0 will win that format war.

Some USB 2.0 interfaces such as the RME Fireface UC perform really well (and the Fireface UC often performs better than the FF400 firewire interface it is based on). Other good performers I know of are the EMU 0404 USB, Native INstruments Audio Kontrol 1 and Edirol UA-25EX. These don't offer a lot of I/O however.

One thing that firewire does better is higher I/O counts, but again, having a proper Texas Instruments chipset helps a lot here.

Expresscard to firewire often doesn't work because the expresscard buss is often integrated with the firewire chipset and SD cards and other assorted crap, so even with a TI chipset in an Expresscard, it has to still pass through the crappy internal firewire, giving no advantage.

Further to this - what's the deal with Apple doing away with Expresscard ? No UAD-2 cards happening there ! (maybe UAD are the audio equivalent of Adobe Flash to Mr. Jobs )

leedsquietman wrote:Further to this - what's the deal with Apple doing away with Expresscard ? No UAD-2 cards happening there ! (maybe UAD are the audio equivalent of Adobe Flash to Mr. Jobs )

yep, there apple lost me!

not going to buy another comp soon i decided, and seriously considering the hackintosh idea...

but again i am sacred it will be as flakey as windows shit and challenge problems and fixes, tweaks, etc. i really don' need... but that is pissing me so off.

or there is some hope lightpipe or whatever it is called will make it.

We need someone to start a new laptop company / OS for audio/video users and let the other companies cater to regular consumers. We can call it Watermelon - to crush the Apples, break the Windows and just be juicier than the rest

buying computers, there's never a good time, there's always something new on the horizon at any time.

If I had money to buy a Macbook, I would probably want to wait not only for quad core i7, but also to see where interfacing lies - expresscard is in a 17" mac book pro only AFAIK at present, but will it be in the next line ? Firewire has gone from 2 ports down to one, from TI to Agere back to TI after a brief outcry and now back to Agere, is lightpipe or USB 3 going to be the next standard (many investors have their foot in both camps ...).

I think we all know that firewire 400/800 is slowly being phased out but it still represents most of the quality audio interfaces (esp for multi I/O), so buying new audio interfaces is perilous too, will it be legacy within a couple of years etc.. Then again, some people predicted firewire would be dead 5 years ago, and others predicted the death of vinyl 25 years ago It's now more in vogue than the format which replaced it (CD).

^^^ of course it is never a real good time to purchase a comp. the development / changes are just way to fast...

i am lucky, i really considered a UAD solo card 2 years back... lucky that i decided not to... stuff like that is annoying, really annoying.

My Lenovo T61 is a Hackintosh and I use this at the moment mainly for DJing with Traktor and runs my interface in OSX with a lower and more stable latency than the same laptop running XP SP3, even with a partition that is entirely dedicated to audio.
In my studio I also run XP and OSX on a PC (dual core 2.13Ghz, 3GB rAM etc) & I had to update OSX to 10.5.5 from 10.5.1 to run Pro tools 8 that I've just bought. Here in lies the problem with a HAckintosh, even though I even practiced the upgrade on a VMWare installation I still managed to trash the system and actually had to start from scratch. I managed to get it up & running this weekend after literally hours pain (more like days) and research.
If you can find a documented process on one of the HAckintosh sites for your hardware then it is much easier. I updated my T61 and that was up & running pretty quickly but the problem with PC's is that they tend to be a collection of parts and therefore means that its difficult to find somebody with the exact same setup.

^^^ thanks for the info!!!

very useful, as i am seriously consider a lenovo / hackintosh, if apples hardware continues like that.

it's a pain, f**king windows shit is just 100% out of the question, and apples HW starts to suck.

damn computer shit!

SubFunk wrote:

Anubis wrote:USB 3.0 is out!

USB 3.0 or 4.0 or 5.0 will be always mediocre compared to firewire (including a further development of firewire here!!! that sadly because of the poor implemention in PCs want probably happen ) because the core is already bad...

it is a bus system, different data can only 'flow' after each other... not like in firewire simultaneously. (sorry for the noob explanation, but USB is shit, supposedly being fast or not, well usb 2.0 is only faster on a piece of paper in comparison to firewire 400)

and yes, i don't understand that at all that PCs only have a 4pin firewire connex, if at all... lenovo still does them a lot though (and already USB 3.0 for the fans of it) and i think sony, too?

still the majority of real professional sound cards run via firewire (for a reason!) and damn PC laptops suck in that department and the fact they can run only windows or linux, though.

and i think no audio interface absolute none does use usb 3.0 yet.

Yeah. Lack of Firewire for audio is a bitch, but for those of us that work in video it's a bit of a killer. Capturing video from a vid recorder via USB is sketchy at best. You need the large stream capacity of Firewire.

^ I once tried to tranfer video from my DV cam via USB.. Not trying again.. NEVER!