PCMCIA Firewire Card chipset question

  • Thread starter Thread starter dastrick
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have not used that cardbus

have used successfully the Belkin F5U513v (which had the TI chipset)

(this card tends to cost more the the SIG but was available from Lenovo for under $50 this weekend)

If the SIG cardbus uses the NEC chipset I would bypass it (not even saying it absolutely wont work, just found the NEC and VIA chipsets to be problematic with variety of audio cards)

TI & Lucent chipsets tend to be better choices for audio cards
 
oretez said:
have not used that cardbus

have used successfully the Belkin F5U513v (which had the TI chipset)
Click to expand...

+1
I've got a Belkin F5U512-APL. I assume it has a TI chipset, and I may have read that once...but my memory is foggy. Either way, it's worked great through several laptops and several different interfaces, as well. I got it a few years back for about 20-30 bucks at Best Buy. I think the "APL" means that it's marketed towards Mac, and I have used it with a Mac on one occasion, but I've never actually owned a Mac, and it works just peachy on PC.

New from 24.99: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0000CDMZ3/ref=dp_olp_1
 
Their website doesnt show. Call their tech support or email them.
 
I contacted SIIG and the firewire card I originally asked about does have a TI chipset. I just ordered one. :D

D
 
So I got my SIIG NN-PCM222-S4 in the other day and guess what. It works flawlessly. I took it out of the box, plugged it right into my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop (which was given to me :D) and it installed right away. So then I took it over and plugged in my Firepods and firewire external HDD and it all worked great. I'm a SIIG fan for life. Plus their tech support was quick to answer my question about the TI chipset which it DOES have. :)

Now I've got to give my laptop a test and see if I can record 16 channels at 44.1/96. I am confident that it will.

I'm happy.:D:D:D

And by the way, I ended up ordering my SIIG off of ebay (new from the seller BUY). It was cheaper than newegg + free shipping.
 
dastrick said:
Now I've got to give my laptop a test and see if I can record 16 channels at 44.1/96. I am confident that it will.

I'm happy.:D:D:D
Click to expand...

I'm not so happy any more. I tried to record 8 channels with my laptop, but it didn't work. The error message said too many files...or something like that. Oh well..:mad:

Luckily I had a desktop close by that I just happened to have Cubase installed on (+1 for planning ahead). :D
 
*shrugs*

I can't imagine any reason that any reasonably modern laptop wouldn't be able to handle recording 8 channels unless you don't have enough RAM and you're thrashing the hard drive with panic swapping or something. How much RAM? What OS?
 
RAM is maxed out at 1 GIG. Windows XP Pro. P4 2.8 Ghz. Cubase & OS runs on the internal 7200 rpm hard drive. I record to an external 7200 hard drive connected by firewire to the firewire card. I turned off the screen saver, network, etc...

I was thinking that it should record 8 channels, but then again...:confused:

I didn't have time to play with any of the settings in Cubase (ie. bitrate, buffers, etc.) because I was just trying to hurry up and record so I swapped over to the desktop.

BTW...What is panic swapping?
 
dastrick said:
RAM is maxed out at 1 GIG. Windows XP Pro. P4 2.8 Ghz. Cubase & OS runs on the internal 7200 rpm hard drive. I record to an external 7200 hard drive connected by firewire to the firewire card. I turned off the screen saver, network, etc...

I was thinking that it should record 8 channels, but then again...:confused:

I didn't have time to play with any of the settings in Cubase (ie. bitrate, buffers, etc.) because I was just trying to hurry up and record so I swapped over to the desktop.

BTW...What is panic swapping?
Click to expand...

Panic swapping is severe page thrashing. When a computer runs low on RAM, it uses the hard drive as extra RAM. This works acceptably as long as there is enough RAM to handle the parts of each application that are in active use. As soon as you fall below that threshold, though, just sitting there idle, your computer is paging memory out to disk and bringing memory back in. Extreme cases of this are referred to as panic swapping.

Pedantically, I believe panic swapping originally referred to a specific quirk in the design of early BSD OSes in which the OS was forced to dump entire processes out to disk in order to allow the kernel paging data structures to grow or some such bizarreness. I forget the details. But IIRC, that's a 1970s definition that hasn't applied to any OS in decades. These days, people use the term to describe heavy paging.
 
dastrick said:
RAM is maxed out at 1 GIG. Windows XP Pro. P4 2.8 Ghz. Cubase & OS runs on the internal 7200 rpm hard drive. I record to an external 7200 hard drive connected by firewire to the firewire card. I turned off the screen saver, network, etc...

I was thinking that it should record 8 channels, but then again...:confused:

I didn't have time to play with any of the settings in Cubase (ie. bitrate, buffers, etc.) because I was just trying to hurry up and record so I swapped over to the desktop.

BTW...What is panic swapping?
Click to expand...

I would check and confirm driver selection first. It is possible, depending on driver selection and interface (or other way around) that your settings in Cubase have restricted you to a single stereo pair

From the info supplied there is no reason why that hardware can not be used to track more then 8 channels simultaneously. Bottleneck will still be communication with hard drive. Theoretically firewire(400) should max out, for full duplex (audio in via firewire audio out to HD via firewire), 32 bit floating point @ 96k sampling rate somewhere in neighborbood of 63 tracks (did not double check math and I don't record 96k and floating point converts as integer 24 bit but in real world system issues max tracks before you hit theoretic limit. Even so with modern IDE 7200 rpm drives, in DMA mode with appropriate A/D drivers I've had no trouble tracking 24+ tracks simultaneously on hardware with specs no higher then you've listed and probably considerably older

but again first thing I check is to make sure driver selection is appropriate in Cubase (to double check hardware you might look at down loading Reaper. standard disclaimer no affiliation with Reaper and YMWV but I've found Reaper to be very user friendly. Even if it is ultimately not the tracking program for you I've found it to be a great test bed for trouble shooting system issues
 
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