Ableton Forum

Which soundcards work well with Live on a Laptop?

I would recommend you the emi 2/6 first, then the motu 828 and the RME Hammerfall.
The emi goes for about 300 euros and it is a really great soundcard, also works well with live since you can put your headphones straihgt to the soundcard and you can pre-listen live.
Never buy the VX Pocket 2, it sucks!!!!!!
Cheers, KLK

MOTU 828 (But I've heard that the RME shit the best)

bluehaus wrote:MOTU 828 (But I've heard that the RME shit the best)

I bought the Hammerfall Cardbus and Multiface about 2 weeks ago - its really expensive but you pay for what you get.

The Hammerfall is rock solid, the support is brilliant (they give you their entire website contents including major technical stuff on cd), it comes with advanced mixer software and it sounds absolutely amazing - I can even route up to 8 tracks in Live to 8 seperate outputs on the Multiface.

Stop pissing your wages away for a few weeks - save - it'll be worth it.

that was me if anyone cares.

Do you use the Hammerfall Multiface card on a MAC or a PC?
Z.

zendo wrote:Do you use the Hammerfall Multiface card on a MAC or a PC?
Z.

sorry - forgot to say. PC

Mark Henning wrote:

zendo wrote:Do you use the Hammerfall Multiface card on a MAC or a PC?
Z.

sorry - forgot to say. PC

I've got the multiface on the macintosh.
In europe, I think the RME mobile hammerfall (digiface/
multiface) are not more expensive than the 828.

I'm happy with the multiface on the Mac, although
I believe support on the windows side is probably
better. On the mac there is ASIO only (no soundmanager)
support.

Speaking of the emi2|6 which I also use sometimes, the
version 2.0 drivers from June are much nicer.

There's really no comparing the two devices, however.
The hammerfall is very heavy duty, has professional
features like smpte and word clock, 8 analog and 16 digital
i/o channels, 1 midi i/o port, and in-hardware matrix mixing.

-Yon

i heard rumors that the RME does produce clicks if you also use it as MIDI inerface. This seems especially true with Macintosh Powerbooks ( Ti Rev C ) under OS 9 . Anyone here who is using this setup and has simmilar experiences ?

robert

It was confirmed by RME that the 550/667 Titanium Powerbooks produce clicks/crackles when OMS is activated. This is due to the fact that these machines only allow one interupt per/ms (as from USB), when receiving Midi there may occur up to 3 per/ms, the DMA controller then deletes data wich results in 32 samples of digital zero. This causes the clicks in the audio playback.

This behaviour is likely to occur on these two TiBooks with all cards that rely heavily on bus-utilisation.

According to RME there is no way to fix this with the card-drivers. Only recommandation they can give therefore ist using external Midi-gear when sending Midi (or use a Ti-Book of the 500-series).

Nevertheless the RME multiface itself is really worth its price (and as long as you aren't on one of these two TiBooks you should get along without trouble or external Midi-gear). It is rocksolid, sounds amazingly well, (as mentioned in the thread) it has a TotalMix functionality that allows to route everything with everything, and not to forget the best support you could wish for.

I use the Motu 828 with my Titanium Laptop and it works perfectly. It was effortless to set up once I discovered where LIVE wanted the ASIO driver to go (Resources file). On the www.unicornation.com bb there are many reports of problems with PCs. Are you going to get a Mac or a PC?

I have the 828 and a RME multiface... if you are going PC get the RME if you are going mac get the RME if you dont have one of those 2 tibook rev's.. .out side of that the 828 is good, but NO WAY would i use mine on the PC.

::chris_borgia::

And don't forget the $34 Griffin iMic if you're on Mac OS 10, especially since next month OS 10.2 Core Audio goes natively multi I/O (Of course 10.2 is $129). But my crappy little iMic will now give me prelistening! BTW, here's a 10.2/audio press release.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/audio.html

10.2 will have it's own reverb!?

Steve

Is this TiBook 550/667 crackle thing likely to be improved by OS X drivers, or is it purely a hardware thing?
And just to confirm - this is just when using MIDI at the same time as audio, right? No problems when just using the RME for audio?

It seems to be a hardware issue and is only known to occure when you send Midi. But as said, there's no fix for this and RME recommend therefore not to use HDSPs with these two TiBooks.
Well, I would abandon these TiBooks not the HDSP