Sweet toy: M-Audio Firewire Solo

I spent a whole day today trying out the M-Audio Firewire Solo, a Firewire based audio interface, and I have to say that this is one heck of a cool audio gear. It does exactly what I longed for so many year: enable me to use all sort of software based synthesizer, a interface box with pre-amp for professional microphone, compatible with my notebook (or any notebook with wither a built-in Firewire interface, or a PC Card slot for adding Firewire interface. The FireWire Solo does it all. There are, however, some tricks about how to set it right.

First of all, the entire audio app works with the native Firewire Solo ASIO driver. Well, at least I haven’t seen one that failed to utilize it. To set it up, however, can be a bit tricky and really depends on the application. The real of thumb is that you have to make sure that you choose “FW Solo ASIO” driver, and NOT the FW Solo Audio 1 / 2. The second one is a DirectSound driver. DirectSound gave you way much latency that it’s basically useless. For application specific issue:


For Vegas Pro 6, Acid Pro 5, and Fruity Loop 5: Nothing special setup. Just choose the “FW Solo ASIO” Driver.

For Cakewalk Sonar 3 and 4: For some reason, by default it set to “FW Solo Audio 1 / 2” driver. I have to explicitly choose non-[ASIO] driver like MME or KSM/DS, restart, and then choose ASIO again to bring up the “ASIO Solo” driver.

For Nuendo 2.2: you need to go to menu [Device] [Device Setup], choose item [VST Multotrack], and then choose ASIO Driver as [M-Audio FW ASIO].

Once you got them set up, you can enjoy the super low latency. On my Pentium III 1GHz 512Mb RAM notebook, I got 6ms latency under Sonar 4. On my Pentium 4 2.8GHz desktop, I can go all the way down to 2 or even 1ms. The more VST Instrument you use, however, the more power you machine needs to have.

Other tidbits about various music applications:

- Somehow when Sonar 3 plays the metronome thru speaker, it doesn’t play thru the Firewire Solo interface but instead really play to the internal speaker. Sonar 4 fixed that problem. So I have to use Sonar 4. Otherwise, how can I keep the metronome voice on the headphone while I dub multiple vocal tracks? (Need the metronome with all the other vocal tracks play from the headphone.)

- VST Plug-in Hypersonic: man, a synthesizer from heaven! Once I used it, I cannot stand all the old Sound Font stuff. And since its standard VST Plug-in, I can use it with Sonar 4 without any problem.

- Vegas 6 and Acid Pro 5: they work with my Firewire Solo perfectly. However, now that I figure out how to use Sonar 4, I really don’t need Vegas 6 anymore. For Acid Pro, however, I think there are still some features that are unique, so I guess I will still spend some time to learn it.