macbook and m-audio 410 firewire

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Fetusborg

Fetusborg

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hello everyone
im doing some research for my girlfriend, shes a singer, and is going to upgrade her ibook to a macbook 13 inch... and is looking for a nice soundcard.

we narrowed it down to the 410 firewire.

so i want to ask if the compatability is good to go ?
i researched around of course, but decided to get a final verdict here.

its going to be a simple mobile setup.
guitar/voice --> 410 --> macbook.

no mixer. no preamps.

so will it all work right out the box? no need to buy cards or etc?

thanks!
 
I wouldn't. M-Audio drivers are terrible, and their FireWire bus implementation isn't much better. I have the 410's big brother, the FW1814, and it's buggy as hell. Among its other (probably electrical) flaws, the S/PDIF stops working unless it is the only device on the FireWire bus---not the only bus-powered device---the only device, period.

Driver-wise, I ended up rolling back the drivers to the last version prior to when they added support for M-Powered because the M-Powered versions disabled the ability to put the computer to sleep. That's on PowerPC machines, so if it was that bad even with hardware that they've tested on for years, I don't even want to think about what a cess pool their drivers would probably be on Intel hardware that just came out a year ago....

Oh, and M-Audio says you have to shut the machines down before attaching them because they have reports of it damaging computers. Well, that hasn't happened with any modern Mac laptops in many years, but it did provide them with a convenient excuse to write their drivers to be manually loaded with a startup script so that they wouldn't actually have to write a proper driver that works reliably across multiple releases of the OS.

And did I mention that at least in the 10.3 range, almost every time I upgraded Mac OS X, their damn driver broke and I had to download a different version? If it wasn't the FW1814, it was the Delta 1010LT. One of them broke with almost every release, and in some releases, they both broke in the same way.

I would even recommend Presonus over M-Audio, and I wouldn't recommend Presonus to my worst enemy after my experience with the FIREPOD's S/PDIF going out and being without it for five weeks while they repaired it.

Once I got MOTU hardware, my M-Audio hardware has sat on a shelf and I haven't looked back. It's the difference between stable and "please, please please work. Please?"

My advice:scrape up the extra $80 for the Edirol FA-101. I've heard nothing but good things about it, and the drivers are maintained by Apple, which are usually better than vendor-proprietary drivers (MOTU's excellent drivers notwithstanding). It's also a much better interface feature-wise---not that you'll necessarily ever need those extra inputs, but at least you're getting something tangible for the extra few bucks.

Try here:

http://www.genesis-technologies.com/piddetail.asp?ProductID=7965007

They claim they can offer a better price if you call them, so it might be even less than an $80 difference. Worth a shot.
 
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