Customer Reviews

M-Audio Firewire Solo US35030 Firewire Audio Interface

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I'm using this on an Apple PowerBook G4 with a 1.33 GHz processor and 768 MB RAM. I mainly record through GarageBand, and after about 10 hours of use, it has worked flawlessly so far.

Controls in front are intuitive. The clip LEDs let you know when your input volumes are maxing out.

Note that you can record only two sources at once: either the front two (mic and line in) or the rear two (two line ins). I initially thought you could record 4 simultaneous tracks with this. There is, however, a switch on the front of the unit that allows you to choose front or rear inputs.

There is an extra firewire plug in the rear of the unit, which allows you to daisy-chain several firewire devices. This works perfectly for me on my 12" PowerBook, which only has one firewire input.

Very low latency on this unit. I can play my electric through GarageBand's multi-effects units while listening on my headphones, and I notice almost zero latency. I'm anxious to try it on my amplifier, to see if it would be suitable for live performance.

I would recommend this for anyone who's thinking about getting into home recording. It's very well designed, well built, and should suit me well for years.

This is great for plug and play. It didn't take me long to figure the ins and outs. I found the latency is reduced with the firewire connection compared to USB devices. I haven't used the mic input yet but the 1/4" input for guitar and bass I have and the latency is close to nill. I have also used the S/PDIF in with my 2-channel mixer with turntables and it sounds great. Worth the invesment.

The M-Audio firewire solo is a really great product for music creation and even for sound output to a stereo. installing the drivers can be tricky though unless you download http://www.m-audio.com/images/global/manuals/FWSolo_UG_EN01.pdf

The PDF explains exaclty what to do.

After I installed everything the M-audio worked flawlessly. I record my own music and also use it for better sound output to my stereo system. The result is clear proffesional recording sound quality.

I recommend it to anyone

As a newcomer to m-audio products, I surfed the net for good/cheap options so that I wouldn't spend a lot of cash in a product I hardly even knew. Thus far, the Firewire Solo has put a smile on my face and the bundled software really makes it profitable since you get a all-in-one kinda combo.
The bundled software includes a ProTools demo, a Live 4 demo which can be upgraded to the full version (great!), ProSessions demo and the GT Player Express. This last piece of software is mind blowing even in its limited demo version. The GT provides you with a limited yet versatile array of guitar effects that'll keep you happy for a longtime.
It took me a while to set this baby up since I didn't take the time to read the manuals and that gave me a headache since the thing wouldn't work properly; remember to download the newest drivers from the m-audio website to avoid any kind of trouble. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is mainly because I'm no m-audio connoisseur and couln't give you an expert's opinion on the in & outs of this thing, but so far it has worked wonderfully!

Each day I have to reboot my machine because the audio outputs either stop working or start to pick up a lot of noise/static. Searching around the internet seems to indicate M-Audio drivers for OS X are not to be held in high regard.


If you havea Mac, I would think twice about buying M-Audio audio interfaces. (For the record, I have OS X 10.4.11).

I'm very impressed. A lot of features and flexibility packed into a small and inexpensive package.

I installed it on a WinXP(SP2) machine which had Adobe Audition on it, and the M-Audio drivers and software were fully integrated into Audition automatically. Very slick. Made some nice home-studio recordings within an hour of opening the box.

The only startup difficulty was in realizing that there were way more options than I expected for to routing inputs to outputs, so picking the right combination of software settings to simply make a recording from one mono mic seemed a bit more complicated that it needs to be. Took me a whole extra 10 minutes of reading the included PDF-format manual :).

Unfortunately, I have an Intel Mac. I researched this item extensively prior to purchase and nowhere does it tell you that it has trouble with Intel Macs. The only driver on the M-Audio site is from early 2006 and does not support Tiger 10.4.11 which is what I am running. I installed the CD-ROM that came in the box, but the unit would not show as being hooked up to my Mac and I could not use any of my Pro Audio programs with it. I couldn't even open the M-Audio control panel on my computer. I then went and installed the most recent Intel driver from the M-Audio site and it got a me a little further; I could now open the control panel so that it could tell me that the device isn't plugged in. All of the lights are on on the device but it is not hooking up right to my computer somehow. Me thinks this is an Intel issue.

Of course now when I go to research this issue I find all the Intel problem reports that I didn't see somehow before I bought this item. Bottom line, this is an outdated item (it is a few years old and has not been updated) and it has outdated software support. I'm not sure if just the latter is the only problem or if the two issues work in concert with each other. I wish I still had my G5 so I could try this thing out and confirm that it really is an Intel issue, but I don't. I just have my 2.2GHz Santa Rosa MacBook Pro.

I am returning this to Amazon and now I will have to start looking for a mobile audio solution again. I knew this thing was too good to be true when I saw the price, and I should have gone with my gut.

This thing has given me endless headaches. It's not clear whether it's just glitchy or if it's poorly supported by my Mac laptop. Sometiems the output ports are available, sometimes they aren't. Sometiems the inputs work, sometimes they don't. The nature of the problems is hard to discover/troubleshoot. Sometimes a restart fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't.

When it works, it works well.

I've used this thing an awful lot and never had any trouble with it. The interface is easy, the sound is really good and best of all, it is simple. Anything extra you'd need to do you can do in whatever recording software you're doing, but I have always been happy with what I've gotten out of it.

I record guitar, bass and conga parts with it (directly and miked), and also transfer a lot of analog sources to digital through it. Never had a problem, would replace instantly if it broke.

This card works well for a while and then just stops working. I've had it for over a year and have been back and forth with tech support. Their answer is always the same -- uninstall the drivers, do some genuflections (on OS X this involves repairing permissions a couple times; if you search the net you will find several folks with the same problems under Windows), and then reinstall the drivers. And they say hopefully it will be fixed in an update. There never was an update that addressed it, and the "fix" works fine, until the card stops working again. All the software responds normally but there is simply no sound coming out. The reinstallation process is tedious and unacceptable for an allegedly class compliant device.

M-Audio makes decent audio products at reasonable prices... the name "audiophile" is a misnomer here but the sound quality is not bad when the thing works. The problem is the constant threat of the sound randomly going out -- sometimes it works fine for months, sometimes it loses sound only hours after reinstalling -- has made this thing frustrating as hell over the time I've had it. And the support sucks -- the people are nice but they have no suggestions other than the same old reinstall game; they acknowledge the problem but there doesn't seem to be any hope that it will be fixed in future drivers.