Ableton Forum

I use one on several PCs and I haven't had a single problem with it.
i agree it should be called FireWire28 not 410, or 210 (as the 10 includes the stereo digital outs too, hehehe), and I wish it had more inputs.

I've used it live with Traktor and I will be using live with Live pretty soon and I'm comfortable that it will perform well.

quandry wrote:if you search much here about it, you will not buy it. if you use a mac, the drivers suck. if you want to record four channels of analog audio at once, forget it--it can only do two at once and should be called "210"--the other two ins are spdif--thanks I know I've read that it just doesn't jive with some pc firewire card manufacturers. it seems a little wierd to me to pay for 10 outputs (who needs 10 outputs) but only have 2 inputs? also the mic pres don't sound so good, and the latency is not so good. that said, some people like theirs, but I tried to help a friend set up a mac with one and we ended up sending it back to get an Alesis Multimix fw 8, and it was way better in terms of latency, mic pres, and having 8 inputs, not two.

correction: 10 Unbalanced Outputs

i think i lucked out and luckily have one of the few 410's that work perfectly. my only bugger with it is that it only has 2 simoultaneous inputs (already mentioned), though, the only reason i bought it was for the 8 analog outputs.

it works fine for me so i have no complaints. it sucks that it's so mass distributed and just about everyone on this forum has had horrible experiences with it.

I'll tell ya right now, for those of you who have good luck with these......I am really really REALLY happy for you

'cause for those of us who didn't/don't.......it's bad.......

I'll really like the layout. Optical/coax spdif..., TWO headphone jacks.....(I miss that one badly) simple routing, small, easy to read..........and no breakout cables!!!!!!!!

are people saying digital inputs and outputs don't count ????

i find them really usefull, easily the best way to link up two pcs.

speaking as a pc user with a 410.

I have had a dreadful time with pops and crackles etc.
If i looked no further than this forum for advice iI would have spent a lot of money unecessarily replacing my 410.

a bit more research and benchmarking, prooved that my pc was the problem, throtling back to 20% of its full performance within 10 minutes of switching on - due to heat.

if i launch live as soon as the pc is turned on i get 10 minutes of sublime performance, no problems at all running multiple soft synths with tons of polyphony and buffer size no larger than 128.

bottom line don't trust everything you read on this forum. (not even this).
do your own research, but if you have a powerfull machine, working properly - and you don't need lot's of analog inputs - i think the 410 is fine.

I was in the same postiion as you about a month and a half ago - I thought "How bad can it be? I mean PC users seem to like it and Mac users hate it, Im a PC user so surely it can't be as bad as alot of people seem to say"...

well, I got one for a very cheap price, like 1/3 of the RRP and I had nothing but PROBLEMS from day one. First, the blinking blue light - I have a 4 pin firewire port and had to use the power adapter. As soon as there was more than 2 things on the power board, it was realllly shaky with its power usage. It would drop out mid set, or mid tune becuase of too much power on the board. I thought "cool I can over come this, ill just put it on a sstand alone power point"... first gig I played at a house party wtih it, surely enough there was no power points nearby so I risked using the power board - same problem, kept clicking out mid set ..... that was my first major gripe , just not knowing if it was going to stay alive during a set.

My second major gripe - I couldn't RECORD audio from the input. It would PLAY it, but it was locking up the signal in LIVE so I couldn't record loops on the fly. Well I could for about 2 min before it locked up. That was the main reason I bought it so I could record live loops either from a mic or my electribe but no... couldnt do that... someone said it was something to do with the buffers or some shit but I had no luck with that.

Luckily the place i bought it from let me get a full refund on it so then I bought a MOTU ultralite and have had all my problems solved. Doesnt drop out, doesnt crash, and I can record incoming audio on the fly.;

So, In my opinion don't do what I did and ignore what others are saying on here - they are shit cards don't take the risk.

gawd..........

I have to say......regardless of my experience......this pisses me off even more!!!!!

I cannot believe that so many people are so pissed about this card. I have a long list of complaints, but I see so many others......makes me wonder how they get away with it...............

Yeah, as other people noted, the mac drivers suck. Really bad. The card also isn't hot-swappable, which turned out to be really annoying with a laptop. However, my biggest gripe with the 410 was the hardware quality; the first unit I had lasted about 3 weeks before it stopped powering on. The casing is decent quality, but all the knobs and buttons on the panels aren't. I ditched my 410 and traded it for a presonus firebox, which has been really great.... some friends of mine (on both mac and pc) are using the 410 with no problems at all, but I think that this card more than any other firewire interface on the market seems to have some serious issues....

I don't really think too highly of m-audio's hardware quality, and I think the 410 is a rather expensive example of this...

I will never ever use anything M audio- company if ignorant designers, retarded support, fake promises, specially FW, anything else - Presonus, Emu, Alesis etc will be better