1 Topic by gamerx (edited by gamerx 2012-02-13 09:19:33)

  • Registered: 2007-07-08
  • Posts: 22

Topic: Firewire 800 does not play ( yes actually play ) on one laptop

Fireface 800 worked fine on this laptop, but today suddenly it does not allow any program to play. To clarify if I open windows media player and try to play a wav file it looks like it's playing ( pause button is on which shows when it's playing ) but the play bar/scrubber sits at the beginning or wherever you drag it. Same with audio editors and DAW, when you try to record the playhead ( or whatever you want to call it ) just sits and cannot proceed. If I turn off fireface windows media player and everything else plays fine through internal sound card progress bars/playhead move normally all the way through.

Tried uninstalling fireface, drivers, reinstalling, nothing works. This is on Windows 7 professional. Latencies ( DPC checker and latencymon) are on average around 150 micorseconds, everything seems fine, it just won't play anything. IMPORTANT; to reiterate, it was all working fine until today.

In device manager it says fireface is working fine, drivers are up to date, but it doesn't work.

I have another laptop which is 99% the same ( same maker, motherboard, video card, very slight mostly cosmetic differences and a different screen ). If I plug in my fireface into that one everything works fine, but I need to get this other one working as that is supposed to be the main workstation.

Any ideas. In my fireface settings I noticed some weird sampling rate ( 1372636532 and pitch set to +5% just as somebody else on this forum posted ), changed that back to 44.1 and 0, but didn't help. Have no idea what else it could be.

EDIT: In the title it should say Fireface 800, obviously :-)

2 Reply by gamerx (edited by gamerx 2012-02-15 16:13:18)

  • Registered: 2007-07-08
  • Posts: 22

Re: Firewire 800 does not play ( yes actually play ) on one laptop

Sooooo...................... no ideas from anybody. Anyway I figured out it was JMicron chipset so I downloaded drivers from their site ( tried MSofts legacy and other ). Still no go. Reinstalled windows still nothing. It is definitely the chipset and not fireface because fireface works fine on other laptops and I'd checked my HD camera on this one and sure enough, problems.

After reinstalling windows and installing the oldest JMicron drivers found on their site, because that is what works on the other laptop,  the camera is working. There was one hiccup, but after restarting captured some video a few times and it worked. I'll test fireface tomorrow and see if it actually works too.

In the meantime, any ideas from RME support guys, what this could be all about? I see from the other posts that you're not fans of JMicron firewire chipset, but it did work before and it still works on the other laptop and apparently that is the same chipset used on Clevos sold by people selling laptops specifically tailored for audio.

  • Jeff
  • Jeff
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  • From: USA
  • Registered: 2007-05-21
  • Posts: 4,667

Re: Firewire 800 does not play ( yes actually play ) on one laptop

Seems like a FireWire problem based on the odd sample rate displayed. Did you try this?

http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12742

Regards,
Jeff Petersen
Synthax Inc.

Jeff's Website

4 Reply by gamerx (edited by gamerx 2012-02-16 08:35:08)

  • Registered: 2007-07-08
  • Posts: 22

Re: Firewire 800 does not play ( yes actually play ) on one laptop

Yeah, I tried all those things, drivers and combinations of all those, even reinstalled windows and the best I can get is that I can capture video under certain circumstances, so there's some life in that firewire chipset ( although even video capture is screwed up sometimes ). Fireface just gives me some garbled nonsense and noise as video or audio files play. Under legacy drivers playback simply doesn't start. With JMicron drivers playback starts but I get garbled nonsense and error count in fireface settings goes up at a steady rate as it plays. I'm officially out of options here.

Good thing I have two more laptops and Fireface works fine there so it's not an emergency. One of those is exactly the same as this "broken" one, so I know that hardware is supposed to work. If anybody has any ideas please chime in. At this point I'm assuming it's a hardware failure ( firewire port or chip/controller ), any chance of an easy fix? ( it' a laptop so just swapping a PCI card doesn't apply ) Everything else on this machine works fine.

Thanks