Ableton Forum

Ok now normally you'd be expecting these two devices to be working together but they seem to be fighting each other at the moment. I understand this is more an M-Audio problem than a Live problem but I'm really desperate for help here and hoping someone else has found a solution.

You hear about it all the dramas that people have with their M-Audio stuff but so far my firewire audiophile has been working great on a toshiba laptop (which work now wants back since I've resigned.... go figure).

Here's the story. Dell inspiron 9300 laptop (PM750 1.8GHz intel 915PM chipset, 1 gig ram, 60Gb 7200 RPM hard drive) and M-Audio firewire Audiophile.

Brand new install of Ableton Live 5, only other software on laptop is Office, Norton internet security (which is disabled) and the latest drivers and control panel for the Audiophile.

On bootup, the audiophile mixer seems to function ok. Can get sound in and out of it, all level meters work, midi data being sent through.

Everything turns nasty when I start Live 5. the first 20 seconds or so Live is ok, midi data transmitted, audio in and out ok. Live line in level meters respond. When you start to try and arm tracks for recording the control panel for the mixer hangs, level meters for the Line in in Live no longer work, midi data is cut and the program slowly grinds to a halt. The weird thing is that audio is still tranmitted from the line ins to the outputs (although you have no level controls) and can't route through to other outputs with the mixer app hanging.

I've tried installing a couple of different versions of the m-audio drivers with exactly the same problems.

Another thing that I find a bit peculiar is that you can switch off the Audiophile when this happens and Live doesn't go into the dreaded "no audio" message. In fact you can exit out of live and open it up again with the audiophile off and it still doesn't report the "no audio". It's only when you reboot with the Audiophile turned off and start Live that it pick up you don't have the interface on. Running live through the onboard sound seems to work with no dramas at all. Every now and then when you restart ableton (without a reboot) after a crash it detects another rewire master application and spits out an error message but I'm pretty sure it's just cos it hasn't closed down properly cos there is no other software on this machine.

Has anyone else experience this sort of behavoiur?

Oh man, I'm feeling your pain. I too had an Audiophile Firewire box which worked great with Live 4 on a Mac Powerbook. For reasons I won't go into, I switched to a... Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop, brand new. I immediately descended into Firewire hell, learining (against my will) about IRQ's and all sorts of PC crap.

After having been on the phone at least a half-dozen times with really good, nice, understanding people at M-Audio, the only conclusion we collectively came to is that Firewire on a Dell Inspiron 9300 is virtually unusable. I'm selling my Audophile Firewire, and in the meantime I'm using an Echo Indigo DJ card lent by a friend, that works just fine. I miss the outboard colume control, I miss the ability to record right into the laptop, but at least everything works, and Live 5 is not giving me any more audio out problems. Plenty of other problems, but not that.

Sorry I don't have better/more useful news.

St.

pfffff
my dell inspiron is allready on it's way to my doorstep...
getting pretty scared now.
I've got a firewire DIGI 002; you guys reckon I'll have the same shit hanging over my head pretty soon??
or is it the firewire to m-audio that is the bitch, and for some odd reason firewire on the digdesign works fine
I know this is stupid thinking, but very wishfull too.......

allright.....
this is strange..
totally in panic I look up all the compatibility issues with the digi002 on the digidesignwebsite and it says:



Recommended Laptops

* Dell Precision Workstation M60
* Dell Inspiron 9300 (Pentium M, 915PM chipset)
* Dell Inspiron 8500 (Pentium 4-M)
* Dell Inspiron 600m (Centrino)
* HP Compaq Business Notebook nx8000
* IBM ThinkPad R40 Series
* IBM ThinkPad R50 Series
* IBM ThinkPad T Series (except for T43 model)
* Toshiba Satellite 1900 series


http://www.digidesign.com/compato/xp/002rack/

which for you guys would mean that firewire at dell is not the issue!!!
I cannot test it, cauz it's not here yet, but it seems as if protools is running fine, even recommended by digi on a dell ispiron 9300, which states that firewire is not the bitch doing you wrong
So or m-audio and dell inspiron are doing a mismatch
which should and could be helped with a driver of some sort (which they will have to make first, stating your correspondence , or ableton has something wrong with the dell firewire setup.
But, correct me if I am wrong, this here which I just found at digi's states that firewire is just fine, right?

last post for tonight on this subject.... found a few posts on the same subject somewhere else...
bottom of the thread
http://barnson.org/node/607

Oakie doakie.... There's 2 weeks of my life that I'll never get back.

The good news is that it seems to now be fixed. It was stable for over an hour this morning. It should be noted that if you check this thread http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/showth ... t388993725 you'll se a few people using both MOTU and Edirol on the 9300's with no problems at all.

From what I can tell it looks like a combination of Dells shitty firewire port and M-Audio's shitty drivers.

I bought a Belkin PCMCIA - Firewire adaptor http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductP ... _Id=157880
It has the magical TI chipset.
I plugged the card in and it installed straight away, was found in the device manager as the Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE1394 Host Controller rather than Dells firewire port which comes up as the generic OHCI Compliant IEEE1394 Host Controller. I assume this means that the Inspiron 9300 does not have a TI chipset.

I've tried upsetting it by hot plugging it and turning the interface off and on in the middle of a set and so far it keeps coming back up. The only evidence of being able to upset it is by turning the interface off and on in the middle of a live set when somtimes it doesn't recieve MIDI. Audio comes back ok but MIDI is a bit hit and miss. That being said, if you restart Live all is good again.

Finally I can get on with making music instead of this bullshit .

It's Friday, the grass is green, the sun is shining, birds are singing and for the first time in 2 weeks, the computer gods are smiling on me!

I'll report back when I've been using it for a week or so and let everyone know any issues.

Um, I should probably have mentioned that the M-Audio people also suggested the ADSTech Pyro 1394DV PCM/CIA card with the TI chip, which worked a little better for me, but not dependably enough for me to do anything like, say, play in public. So I'm getting rid of that little gadget, as well. If anyone has any suggestions (not rude) about anything else I can try using the combination of the Pyro card and the Audiophile Firewire box, I'm open.

Sorry if I caused panic for others. Apparently the situation isn't as dire as I made it out to be.

St.

Dude, it was pretty dire for me for a couple of weeks there

I think it's a problem with the new drivers of the firewire audiophile, not with the firewire port on the laptop. I've used an Ibook G4 (OS 10.3.9), a firewire audiophile, Live and Reason with no problem until I updated the driver from version 1.0 to 1.5 . That caused a crash on my midi setup. Still got sound out of the laptop but no midi at all...the app. was dead. I had to reinstall the old driver (1.0) and the midi came back and everything started to work fine again but after 2 weeks the app.(firewire audiophile) is no longer opening, so I can't re-programm it or make any changes to ins and outs of the virtual mixer. I get sound and use the midi with the oxygen 8 and an UC33e. Everytime I try to install the new driver it crashes the midi.

Who knows...

I tried a couple of driver versions with no luck.

Since using the Belkin PCMCIA firewire card I have had no problems at all. Still very stable.