Ableton Forum

I have recently upgraded from an M-Audio Quattro to the FireWire 410, primarily for extra stability when I perform my music live.

When I play live I have Ableton Live 4 and Cubase SX 3 synced up via MIDI Clock on the same computer (SX is the Master). This has never been a problem for the Quattro. However, when I try to boot up Cubase after first opening Ableton with the FW 410, the sound card will not activate and causes Cubase to crash.

I emailed M-Audio tech support and the guy said I have to use ReWire, that I can't multi-client with M-Audio products (even though I could with the Quattro). Except I don't want to use ReWire because I want the I/O of Ableton to be active. My live performance kinda depends on this.

As I said, having both programs accessing the hardware worked fine with the ASIO drivers on the Quattro. When I told the tech support guy this he said that even if I found it worked on the Quattro, they still don't recommend doing it.

My question is: does anyone have any suggestions/workarounds/etc. to help me multi-client with the FW410? The guy at the local music store thought there might be a way to activate/deactivate certain inputs/outputs in each program (Ableton and Cubase) before booting them up so they don't share any I/Os and maybe work okay, but, to date, this hasn't worked either (Cubase still can't access the hardware when Ableton already is).

I posted this on another board but didn't get a response, so maybe it's just not gonna happen. But if anyone's got any ideas at all, a way it might work, it would really help me out. Otherwise, I guess I just wasted my money 'upgrading' to this card.

Thanks.

In all honesty. I couldn't even get the fw410 properly on one machine.
So i higly doubt you will be able to use it double.

Thanks, but I'm not using two machines - just one computer with Ableton and Cubase both open. Having both these programs accessing the card is the problem.

For day-to-day single-client production stuff it's worked fine for me so far (on a PC).

I have only heard bad things about these interfaces --- return it and get a Motu if you can.

One major drawback: No hot-swapping...... + instability

Thanks, but telling me my card is junk doesn't really help me.

As I said before, I use it with a PC and haven't had any problems with it in normal operation yet. I also don't run it bus-powered so no hotswapping doesn't bother me.