• Registered: 2012-09-19
  • Posts: 3

Topic: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

Hello,

Yesterday, I got my 2nd hand FireFace 800 in. Initial installation was a breeze, and even something as simple as audio playback quality is astonishing enough to be enjoying simply listening to music more than on my laptop's onboard soundcard smile And that's hardly getting started with the features I actually bought the unit for...
My initial love quickly turned to dismay when I looked at the sample buffer and delay settings though. My onboard card using ASIO4All drivers was getting lower latencies without glitching than the FireFace! And when I tried to switch between sample rates I was truly appalled to see that Windows 7 still has a blue screen.
After many crashes and reboots, in the end switching my FireWire driver from OHCI 1394 to OHCI 1394 (Legacy) in Win7 stopped the blue screens and effectively halved the sample buffer I can use without glitches, so far so good.
Changing sample rates still doesn't work as I'd expect though. When I select anything abve 88.2kHz in Ableton, playback simply doesn't work. There is no sound, and the transport doesn't even start. At this point I actually have to reboot before it will work again. Simply closing and reopening Ableton doesn't help. In the settings panel, I do see the sample rate changing when I change it in Ableton, so that appears to work. When I change the sample rate from the control panel and try to play an MP3 in Windows Media Player or Foobar2000 (which can use either DirectSound or ASIO-output, I've tried both) there is no sound either, and both don't even appear to be playing (no visualizer, the seek bar does not move, etc.)

Seeing that I'm new to the whole (semi-)professional soundcard world, it might be that I simply have wrong expectations and should use these options differently (I haven't tried recording at higher sample rates, for instance). Please help/inform smile

The FireFace is connected through FW400 to my laptop (a simple Clevo OEM branded i7 machine with 22GB RAM, running Win7 64bit), I installed the latest firmware and drivers from the RME website.

Thanks in advance!

  • syah
  • AD/DA expert
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-02-18
  • Posts: 42

Re: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

Did you try to disable the onboard soundcard in the BIOS? Or maybe the problems are related to the asio4all driver. Did you try to uninstall that driver and use native drivers only (for both the onboard card and the RME)?

Succes ermee...

  • Registered: 2012-09-19
  • Posts: 3

Re: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

Thanks for the reply! I did indeed deinstall the ASIO4All driver, though I haven't tried completely disabling the onboard sound card yet. I'll try that tomorrow. I'm loving every other aspect of the card, since it works exactly as expected for the rest and is basically a breeze to work with. This is the only thing that is not functioning as I expected (though that might still be due to my having little knowledge about how it IS supposed to work smile )

  • Registered: 2008-01-01
  • Posts: 3,025

Re: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

1) Use the "High Performance" Windows power-profile to help against blue screens.

2) Onboard sound is not running via Firewire and likely Firewire is the culprit to your performance issues.

Additionally the latencies reported by ASIO4ALL (connecting to your onboard via WDM) are likely not correct. You can use Live's Loopback latency tutorial to and a loopback cable to measure real values.

  • Registered: 2011-05-04
  • Posts: 249

Re: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

Is your FW controller Texas Instrument chip?
Clevo laptops might be using Jmicron chip, which is not really a good FW controller.
http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=8592

(If your FW controller is NOT TI chip......)
Using Texas Instrument chip FW controller is almost de facto standard for successful use of FW audio interface, and that's been extremely well known. VIA chip or Agere chip (used Macbook Pro) are also fine, but not Jmicron or Ricoh. There are some FW expresscards which uses a TI FW chipset, but if your laptop doesn't have a expresscard slot, I suggest to replace the laptop.

  • Registered: 2008-01-01
  • Posts: 3,025

Re: FireFace 800: Ableton (and others) not playing on higher sample rates

Agere/LSI chips of revision 7 or higher may work better than current TI chips. At least I am using one without any kind of issues on _non_ legacy Firewire drivers while I heard/read of issues with TI FW ports on some mainboard. In the end it might be more a question of proper implementation than of whether a TI chip is used or not, though.