Is the M-Audio Fast Track any good?

[smaucher]

I own Fast Track Pro, never had a single problem with it. Plugged it in, it worked, never stopped, no trouble whatsoever

S

but they all say its garbage, though. what are we doing wrong then, the two of us?

[twisted-space]

Never had a problem with mine either. Used on xp, vista and win 7.

[smaucher]

three!

[Fizmarble]

USB is to Firewire as Dial-up is to DSL.

so not true.

[oddstep]

I have not had any problems with mine. Its stable and loud and can be used without a computer as a ad spdif interface. People have problems with it... maybe down to drivers and poorly chosen buffer settings? Its great for its price, has a decent sound and is easy to use.
I also have a fw410 which leads me to think that firewire is over rated... perhaps if I had a topend set up and was recording 8 tracks of audio simultaenously I would see things differently.

[Guff Tong]

Mine was 'ok' for about 3 years then just started to put out v-loud white noise at random times...needing to be re-started (along with Live)

Sold it for £80 to some Croatian dude on ebay.

(soz mate )

Also tripped out every time the wife lit our gas oven and stopped working for no apparent reason at other times.

And its by M-Audio so you cant post any studio pics on the 'Post your studio and sexy cat' without people noticing.

[wehkah]

I own Fast Track Pro, never had a single problem with it. Plugged it in, it worked, never stopped, no trouble whatsoever

S

+1

very good product!

cheers
T

[tinymachines]

USB is to Firewire as Dial-up is to DSL.

so not true.

I learned something new today. I came from a film production background where you don't use equipment unless it's connected by firewire. Everyone laughs at USB. But I just looked the the comparison rates, and USB can be just as good as firewire. Interesting. Thanks for calling me on that.

[beats me]

General rule of thumb is don't buy any m-audio audio interface EVER. Sure you'll find some people that got them to work but they are the #1 complained about manufacturer so why risk it when there are so many other options out there.

[Fizmarble]

USB is to Firewire as Dial-up is to DSL.

so not true.

I learned something new today. I came from a film production background where you don't use equipment unless it's connected by firewire. Everyone laughs at USB. But I just looked the the comparison rates, and USB can be just as good as firewire. Interesting. Thanks for calling me on that.

Awesome!

[oddstep]

General rule of thumb is don't buy any m-audio audio interface EVER. Sure you'll find some people that got them to work but they are the #1 complained about manufacturer so why risk it when there are so many other options out there.

its a fair point - but there's also a sampling effect in that they have a really big market share for stuff in their price range... so they get lots of customers and a fair number of complaints as well.

[beats me]

General rule of thumb is don't buy any m-audio audio interface EVER. Sure you'll find some people that got them to work but they are the #1 complained about manufacturer so why risk it when there are so many other options out there.

its a fair point - but there's also a sampling effect in that they have a really big market share for stuff in their price range... so they get lots of customers and a fair number of complaints as well.

True but if you started a thread about m-audio audio interfaces on any forum, and I mean any, you're going to get at least half the people saying they are a POS. Even if they sell 10 times the interfaces of any other manufacturer I don't know why anybody would want to risk it and we're not talking a huge difference in price with other interfaces.

I'd also bet a large amount of their customers come from people who have them pushed on them by employees of retail stores and the customer doesn't know any better (and most likely the employee doesn't know any better either).

[Laurens48711]

USB is to Firewire as Dial-up is to DSL.

True. Buy a firewire device if you can.

[Simbosan]

^^^ Haha, would you take advice from this man =)

S

[gjm]

If you have a drive with both USB2 and FW400, try bench marking the read/write speeds using both interfaces. A good program for PC is HD Tach by Simpli Software. It's free to DL. It's a sequential test done at various points of your drive which gives you an average. The advantage of FW will become clear. How close the data transfer rates are to the way your audio interface behaves are up for discussion, but the way the FW protocol deals with sending and receiving it's packets of data does have advantages for audio interfaces as well as hard drives.