Fast Track Pro

[leaversday]

What's up guys...

I have a question regarding the fast track pro recording interface. I have 2 MACs. 1 G5 Dual Core Power PC and 1 MacBook Pro Intel Core Duo. I want to pick up a smaller, more portable USB/Firewire interface for on the go recording. I want something that comes ready to work with both MAC platforms but mainly the laptop since it is for portable recording.

Anybody got an opinion on what I can't get that fits about a $200.00 budget. I was looking at the M-Audio Fast Track Pro but was not sure if it is compatible on the Intel platform.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[fuzzrhythm]

I used it briefly with a G5 iMac. I had an issue where it would kill everything on my USB bus (keyboard, mouse, printer, etc) when waking from sleep. Never could get it sorted out. I've avoided anything M-Audio that requires drivers ever since then.

Tascam and Mackie have some interfaces around $200 that get good reviews.

I use a Mackie Onyx Satellite and it goes for $180 on MusiciansFriend.com. No driver issues with that one, sounds great, tons of features, and you can leave the base station plugged into the desktop and take the mobile portion when you use the laptop.

 

[jfrog]

Have you found anything yet? I'm going thru the same search....

Besides the Fast Track Pro, other options I've found (at Sweetwater.com)
are:

E-MU 0404 USB
TASCAM US-144

all 3 are $199 and appear to have similar features.

 

[sonnylarsen]

Easy way is to check out the drivers. If you take a look at the drivers for the Fasttrack Pro, you'll see that they offer separate drivers for PPC based macs and Intel based macs up until 10.4.11, after that if you look at the driver descriptions you'll see that for 10.4.11 and 10.5.1 the drivers are described as "dual binaries" which will work for both intel and PPC.

So, for the short answer, the Fasttrack Pro will work fine on both of your systems.
I used to have one myself for my iBook G4, but there was some weird problem with pops and clicks that no one else in the universe seemed to have. It was definitely a hardware thing because it was in every recording app I tried. M-Audio could not figure it out. I took a look at my hard drive usage and I realized that there were huge spikes on my hdd (I was booting from and recording to a LaCie fw drive) that roughly corresponded to the clicks and popson the recordings. So, between myself and the M-audio people, we decided that either the unit was defective (I couldn't test that as no local retailers had any) or there was something about the FT Pro that cause some weirdness with the hdd that did not happen with my venerable Omnistudio USB.

The whole experience sucked, but I could not find one other user who had the problem, so I figured it must just be my bad luck. (I only bought it in the first place to use PT M-Powered on my laptop). The Omnistudio USB is evidently too old for them to add PT support for it. Oh Well.

 

[zazz]

m_audio are pissing me off...u would think that with something as popular as this that they would embrace 64bit ..

they keep on bleating about how they cant do drivers for every opp system that microsoft spew out but ms can do a whole operating system ...they just need to do the driver.