I'd take a real good look at the Echo Layla with PCMCIA.

<<I'd take a real good look at the Echo Layla with PCMCIA.>>

Yes I agree. My colleague uses this setup on his laptop and it works great. He also has a Layla 24 in his studio and so do I.

drbam

Thanks for the advice. A lot of people seem to recommend Layla, could you elaborate as to some of the reasons?

Also, where online is a good place to buy?

Thanks for helping me out.

The Echo products have very good sounding converters, have been extremely reliable, and most importantly for me, they have demonstrated a great record of working flawlessly with SOFO apps. This has not been as true for the other popular, although very good interfaces which quite often require some sorting out of driver issues. You can purchase them most anywhere. Do a search and look for the best deal. Expect to pay about $700 for a new one, maybe a bit less. They're usually available on ebay as well.

Good luck,

drbam

I appreciate all of the suggestions. I really would like to use the Firestation. The built in mixer and included mic-pre's would be very useful to me. As would the Firewire interface>easy desktop and laptop use. I think I'm going to wait until the driver issues are straightened out.

It seems Firestation will play back correctly via ASIO, but it will not record using ASIO.

Here's what I have learned from Presonus.

Firestation assumes the audio bits to be right aligned. There are 32 total bits in each audio sample, but only 24 are actually used. Firestation assumes bits number 9-32 to be the bits containing the audio data.

V4 on the other hand is left aligned and assumes that bits 1-24 are the bits containing the audio data.

Upon recording, V4 picks up these garbage bits, and you know the rest, garbage in, garbage out.


From Sonic Foundry.

This issue has been resolved for the forthcoming release of Acid 4c. No timetable for a fix for V4.


Hopefully it won't be too long since they must have this pretty well worked out to have fixed it in Acid 4.0c.

I would think that they would fix the dedicated multitrack software (V4) before fixing Acid, since as far as I know, Acid can't record more than 2 channels at once and the primary purpose for the Firestation is multichannel recording.

- Mark

<<I would think that they would fix the dedicated multitrack software (V4) before fixing Acid, since as far as I know, Acid can't record more than 2 channels at once and the primary purpose for the Firestation is multichannel recording.>>

Vegas has always followed a few months behind Acid in terms of upgrade features and releases. I assume its just a matter of where they are in their development schedule, not whether one app is more prioritized than another.

drbam

>>I would think that they would fix the dedicated multitrack software (V4) before fixing Acid, since as far as I know, Acid can't record more than 2 channels at once and the primary purpose for the Firestation is multichannel recording.
<<

It has nothing to do with which is "more important" or how Vegas or ACID interface with the hardware. They are both equally important.

ACID discovered the problem and fixed it after Vegas 4.0c was released. ACID 4.0c is slated to be released tomorrow or early next week, so it will see the fix first.

This is just a matter of when in the release schedule the problem was discovered and fixed. Don't read any more into it than that.

We are determining when Vegas 4.0 will get the fix, as mLan support is important.


Peter

Peter,

Thanks for the information. It is much easier to wait for a fix when the software company recognizes the issue and has it on the "to do" list. At least there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm curious, how long was it between the initial release and the first update? And from the first update to the second update? I know, I know, I'm having a hard time letting it go! Sorry.

- Mark