M-Audio Fast Track USB - USB 1.1??

S

stodge

New member
Looks like the forum ate my original post, so I'll try again.

I bought an M-Audio Fast Track USB last night, but I can't get it to work. I either get a huge delay between playing a note on my guitar and hearing the resultant sound with effects or the applications hang. I've tried selecting various drivers, two of which I can select are ASIO - one appears to be generic and one appears to be M-Audio's own driver. This is WinXP + SP2.

I just noticed this morning that the USB is only 1.1 and not 2.0. Has anyone noticed any problems with this?

Are other USB devices in the same price range USB 2.0 or are they all 1.1?

Thanks
 
I haven't used it personally, but a good friend of mine bought one, and we installed it, and I just want to say the thing is horrible. Worst thing I have ever laid my eyes on. I would go Creative before I go with that lol. Anyways, yeah I notice many people having many problems with it. I think it's stupid how they designed the thing too. A knob that you turn right to hear stuff out your speakers, and turn it left, and hear the mic but nothing else? Anyways, check your ASIO & buffer sizes. A large buffer, will give you more latency, less will less latency, but too low, and your going to have pops etc.

Anyways congrats on your purchase, and have fun once you get it working
 
Mindset said:
I haven't used it personally, but a good friend of mine bought one, and we installed it, and I just want to say the thing is horrible. Worst thing I have ever laid my eyes on. I would go Creative before I go with that lol. Anyways, yeah I notice many people having many problems with it. I think it's stupid how they designed the thing too. A knob that you turn right to hear stuff out your speakers, and turn it left, and hear the mic but nothing else? Anyways, check your ASIO & buffer sizes. A large buffer, will give you more latency, less will less latency, but too low, and your going to have pops etc.

Anyways congrats on your purchase, and have fun once you get it working
Click to expand...

:(

What specifically is horrible about it apart from the left/right thing?
 
The left/right thing is not horrible, it's a design choice. I assume what he's talking about is the "mix" control. The purpose of this is to hear your live sources with low or no latency. The mix knob allows you to control how much of the live input you hear mixed in with the tracks from the computer. It's actually a good feature if you need to use the interface to record live tracks while listening back to recorded tracks.
 
Ok this is driving me nuts.

I installed the drivers, and I can select Fast Track is the input and output audio devices. I plugged my guitar and headphones into the FT box and I can hear my basic guitar signal if I turn the mix knob all the way to the left. If I run the MAudio FX software Guitar Player Express and add a distortion pedal I can hear the noise produced by the pedal, but I don't hear anything from my guitar through it.

If I try to fiddle with the ASIO audio settings and it tells me to re-simulate/test the settings nothing happens. The progress bar never moves and the test never completes.

I must be missing something really obvious but for the life of me I can't think what! Help!

Thanks
 
Ok I can get it to work with the Guitar Rig 2 demo, but the latency is awful and it's very noisy.

So for example:

interface = ASIO
sample rate = 44100
output device = m-audio fast track

output latency = 13ms (not likely)
 
I get crackling when I record in FruityLoops 6 or 7 using the Guitar Rig 2 plugin demo. But when I use Ableton Live Lite 6 the sound is clear.

Can I assume this is either a bug in FruityLoops or it can't handle the low latency? I think it's set to around 11ms.

AMD64 3000
1Gb memory
200Gb SATS drive
M-Audio Fast Track USB
 
I installed the demo of Cakewalk Sonar and that works fine too. I can only assume that FruityLoops can't handle Guitar Rig 2 demo as a VST. So I guess I'm screwed from that point of view and I'll need to find something to replace FL that's cheap.
 
stodge said:
I installed the demo of Cakewalk Sonar and that works fine too. I can only assume that FruityLoops can't handle Guitar Rig 2 demo as a VST. So I guess I'm screwed from that point of view and I'll need to find something to replace FL that's cheap.
Click to expand...

Amp modellers are the most taxing plug-in you can use with a DAW at the moment.

You are just asking for trouble with a USB interface. USB eats up a lot more CPU cycles than Firewire or PCI since its communications protocol needs help from your processor to manage the protocol overhead and handshaking.

Firewire uses a more elaborate peer-to-peer protocol which doesn't tax your CPU as much.

As much as you may not want to hear this, an Athlon-64 3000+ is a slow-ish processor by today's standards. It can't compete with a Core2Duo or even a newer Althon-64 X2/Turion.

Cakewalk's Sonar Home Studio 6 does almost everthing its bigger brother's do and costs $99; $160 for the XL version.
 
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