Topic: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Hi, I bought a used ff400 and I can not get it to work properly.

I am on window 11 on a mini pc. I have installed a firewire card in it but there is no place to plug in the molex power. So, no buss power. The ff400 is plugged in using the original power supply.

The firewire card works properly. It shows up in the device Mgr under the ieee1394 host controller. It has the Texas instruments chipset xio2213b

The fireface powers up and shows up under sound video and game controllers. It is an option to select for the computer sounds etc. No sound comes out.

Im using Nuendo 13. And it is up to date.
I can select the fireface asio driver but it shows no ports. If I try to add an input or output, the fireface is greyed out.
It won't open in ableton either.

I have updated the firmware
I have the latest drivers
I have a new cable
I have tried a legacy driver
I have tried a firewire 800 to 400 adapter
I have successfully plugged in a presonus 1602 digital mixer and it works just fine
I have plugged the ff400 into my laptop with built in firewire and windows 10 and it works just fine.
I purchased a new firewire card and still the same issues.
I thought about buying a third one, but they are all basically the same specs.

Is it the molex not being plugged in?  There is no place to attach it in the mini computer and I couldn't find a proper splitter for the fan power to jump off from.
I thought about a wall wart to molex for power. 12v but worried about amperage and dont want to fry anything.

Any suggestions or solutions anyone has would be greatly appreciated

Eddie

2

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Switch in the back correctly set to use external power?

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Yes. Made sure it was 1st thing. Should have put that in my last post!  Lol

4

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Sorry, no further ideas. The unit obviously works, and should do so on Win11 as well. No compatibility issues known to cause the effects that you report.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Please provide a screenshot of Totalmix.

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

So, my friend suggested I installed Asio4all and the ports finally showed up. Audio would not come thru any audio interface I tried.
My friend then busted my stones about how I didnt uninstall the ff400 driver and delete everything about the driver, something I should have guessed to do.
Then reinstall, completely fresh.
Don't just reinstall over the 1st install that was probably corrupt. Fresh install.
I was too busy looking at other peoples post and new ideas when the old tech support guy in me knew all along.

No problems.

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Asio4all? No supported solution. By this you add an ASIO layer over an ASIO layer.
You want RME driver stability and lowest latencies like everybody does? Then please no ASIO4ALL.
Some people seem to think they need this, but it makes no sense, this is a contradiction to the approach of an ASIO driver to have direct access to the Hardware on Windows, ASIO4ALL makes in that regards no sense at all.
And in any case of an issue you would have an unsupportable setup as ASIO4ALL would always be additionally in your signal patch between Windows and the recording interface.

On Windows:
a) for all application with ASIO support, use the RME ASIO driver directly
b) for Windows itself and all applications which also do not support ASIO, create WDM devices in the RME driver settings but only for those I/O ports that you need in Windows.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14

Re: Fireface 400 firewire issues

Already fixed. Thanks anyway.

No asio4all. It just showed that there was something wrong with the install of the rme driver.

All good.