firewire audio interface noob

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 6:36 am

Folks, I just scored a presonus firebox today, and I'm quite happy with the sound/output, except... I find that Live 6.0.1 (and Reason 3) is a bit more cpu hoggish than before.. What could I be doing wrong?

I've got os 10.4.8 2gb ram inside a powerbook g4 1.67ghz... oh and to anyone there that has an identical setup, what's a good buffer size? i jacked mine down to 256 (from 512 which was also working fine)

Otherwise, I reckon there's no other dramas from the looks of things (going to keep looking into it further though)

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 3:20 am

alrighty.... I think i've found the solution... as I was daisy-chaining the firebox from the maxtor external drive, that kind of didn't help

so now it's on the firewire connection on the powerbook, and the hdd is now connected to USB.

bit less demanding it seems, but yeah, overall? quite happy, granted there's a rare click/pop (which i'm trying to figure out why it occurs)

actually I have a noob question... under some software, and the Audio Midi setup utility in osx, do I pick the clock source as the mac? or device?

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 11:12 am

allo? anyone?

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 11:45 am

Definitely the device itself. The other thing is if you want to use more than one interface, you'd sync them to the same clock.

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 12:53 am

cheers for that!

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 12:27 pm

sadly that didn't make any difference though

I honestly dont know what i'm doing wrong here... I've connected the firebox, under system preferences - sound, I put both input/output as the firebox, and under audio/midi setup (utilities) i've changed everything to the firebox too, (clock source was set to Device too) the format under the audio/midi setup also is at 44100 for both input/output

before using it, I used to be able to load up Reason 3.0.5 quite quickly and run it quickly too (512 samples, and had no dramas) and cpu wasn't as demanding, now with the firebox connected, i can tell its using the cpu up more!

Is there anything that I've missed here? i've got 2gb ram, and os 10.4.8 (and had this setup before i got the firebox too, and everything was fine)

if there's anything I missed, or you folks have a question to ask, please feel free to ask me, as I'm really stumped (also a noob with audio interfaces, as i had the assumption that it'd increase the performance slightly on the cpu)

only thing i will try is reboot...

update: well, its cleaned things up a smidge.. and the performance hit is slightly lesser now..

I dont know.. maybe its my imagination and lack of sleep :\