Ableton Forum

hi there
i have aluminium power book osx 10.2.8 and i am looking for
to by a good portable sound card. anny suggestions ?

15"? if you have a PCMCIA slot, i highly recommend the Echo Indigo cards, depending on your I/O needs.

otherwise M-Audio makes several excellent firewire or USB interfaces.

stay away from m-audio interfaces if you have a mac, it is not just me that had really bad problems with their interfaces. i now got a motu 828, it's still portable enough for me, bigger than the m-audio interface i had, but at least it works. it also depends on your budget, but don't buy m-audio, you will only have problems with it.

RME multiface has great convertors, 8 I/O. no problems so far, not on my pc laptop, nor on a friend's titanium PB.
you will find the RME and the MOTU among the most widely used soundcards that don't bring you headaches (at least: MOTU on mac)

hey
just want to thank-you for the response thanxxxx[/quote]

toyo wrote:stay away from m-audio interfaces if you have a mac, it is not just me that had really bad problems with their interfaces. i now got a motu 828, it's still portable enough for me, bigger than the m-audio interface i had, but at least it works. it also depends on your budget, but don't buy m-audio, you will only have problems with it.

what problems have you had with them? and which models? i've got the 410 and not had any problems at all.

i know the usb ones can be rough to use though.

I have had the m-audio FW-410 and some USB one before that, the fw-410 was a nightmare, for the first 6 months i couldn't use it at all, driver issues with Mac OSX. and the best thing was the techsupport, when they finally got back to me it was no help at all, they just didn't care. go over to www.osxaudio.com, there are more complains about m-audio and apple. it might work on pc, but not my mac. i sold the fw-410 to a pc guy, and he is quite happy with it, but there was no way i could have sold it to a mac guy.
i bought a used motu 828 mk1, no problems at all.
but if it works for you thats great.

thats weird.

the RME multiface is working great for me... got the same 'puter as you have.

toyo wrote:I have had the m-audio FW-410 and some USB one before that, the fw-410 was a nightmare, for the first 6 months i couldn't use it at all, driver issues with Mac OSX. and the best thing was the techsupport, when they finally got back to me it was no help at all, they just didn't care. go over to www.osxaudio.com, there are more complains about m-audio and apple. it might work on pc, but not my mac. i sold the fw-410 to a pc guy, and he is quite happy with it, but there was no way i could have sold it to a mac guy.
i bought a used motu 828 mk1, no problems at all.
but if it works for you thats great.

I've been using a Quattro with my macs for about the last two years and for the most part it has been smooth sailing....... except about a year ago when I installed a driver update and didn't remove the old driver. I figured the new driver would update the old one or whatever, but it didn't. My guess is it was trying to simultaneously run two drivers side by side.

It caused my mac to crash on an alarming basis for about a week and one time it crashed live in front of about 150 people. Grey screen, you must restart your computer... The horror. I wasn't even going to use the quattro for that event but I thought I had the problem sorted out.

Anyway, I deleted everything to do with the quattro and reinstalled the driver and that fixed the problem.

One other thing,

I hardly ever shut my powerbook down and if I switch the quattro on without restarting first, after it (quattro) has been off for more than a day or so, it will still crash my powerbook. When I work with ableton at home I usually use the built in card, but when I do use the quattro I always restart my powerbook before switching on the card. This doesn't seem right.

I don't seem to have these sorts of problems with my iMac which runs 10.2

Although I feel it was worth the money I paid for it and it is a decent little card I would not buy another quattro. I gigged with it this evening and after reading this thread I realized that I just don't trust it, not after it crashed my powerbook in a live situation....... even though this has never happened again since then I still don't trust it a hundred percent.

halloo every one
so it looks like m-audio (from what you have been sasying )
it isnot working smoothly with mac. whay then they advertise so much as for mac . the interference. is it a marketing trick. once you already bought the product you stuck with it . is there no returning policy or in the beginning it works o.k and then the complications coming out a little later . then maybe people shouldn,t by m-audio
p.s.please i would like to see more comments on this matter[/b][/i]

I have the M-Audio Firewire 1814 and it works great with my PowerBook G4. I also have a LaCie Firewire external Big Disk extreme, and that did cause some issues with the M-Audio 1814 (dropped Audio, Stuttering, and complete shutdown of the 1814), but this is an Apple/LaCie Firewire problem and has nothing to do with the 1814. Apparently the two Firewire devices use the same bus. Anyway, I've also used the M-Audio Mobile Pre USB and it worked great. But who knows, maybe I've just been lucky.

M-Audio was also giving away a free Luna Mic with the purchase of the Firewire 1814, so that was a big part of the decision making process for me since I neded a Mic.

go check the bugs&problems forum,
you'll see tons of m-audio related trouble posts.

I'll definately go with the RME Multiface.

good luch with your purchase