Soundcard frustration.

[Frederic Gelinas]

I've been using a little M-Audio Fast Track Ultra for a year now and it served me well. I decided to go a level up and I bought a Focusrite Scarlett 18i6. After installing the latest drivers, I realized that the unit seems broken/incompatible : the audio drops out after a couple of seconds and the unit is frozen. I'm in the process of returning it to the dealer. What a pain. I had to share it.

[doncolga]

I've been using a little M-Audio Fast Track Ultra for a year now and it served me well. I decided to go a level up and I bought a Focusrite Scarlett 18i6. After installing the latest drivers, I realized that the unit seems broken/incompatible : the audio drops out after a couple of seconds and the unit is frozen. I'm in the process of returning it to the dealer. What a pain. I had to share it.

Bummer indeed. I've had good luck with sound cards, but I've only had two for a length of time. Tascam FW 1804 (worked fine and probably should have just stayed with it), and an RME Multiface II that connects via PCIe that I've had for a few years. I did have a MOTU once for a little while, but I returned it.

Is the Focusrite Firewire or USB? If it's Firewire, your Firewire chipset can be an issue.

[Frederic Gelinas]

It's USB. I will get a Firewire unit as soon as I get my money back.

[bzb]

If it works intermittently like that, it could be the buffer and its latency, too. Check your processor and memory usage when running the card.

Some tricks are to minimize the number of processes that are running - turn off extraneous stuff like antivirus, iTunes Helper, stuff like that. Sometimes turning off wireless helps, too - especially if your processor is a bit on the old side.

What program is it doing this in? How much memory are you running?

[Frederic Gelinas]

Working as a programmer, I need a fast PC and lots of RAM. With my USB M-Audio I'm replacing, I ran 8 channels input and 4 out at the same time without any problem. With the new one, it just doesn't work. It's not an intermittent problem. I hear audio for a maximum of 30 seconds before it freezes. The dealer has agreed to take it back and refund me. I'll still have to pay the shipping...

[bzb]

Sorry dude, that's hella frustrating.

We just lost a ton of "backup" data on a Western Digital My Book Live 2TB NAS. It was purchased 3 weeks ago and got the dreaded blue dot of death. Western Digital says to go pay some third party $1000 to get the data off the drive. And then send them the drive and they'll send a new one (which will probably do the same crap eventually).

I spent around 10 hours over the last two days trying all kinds of tools and Linux distros and data recovery software... can't even mount the partition that has all the data.

Friggin computers.

[Ken Lustgarten]

bzb: SpinRite is the best program that I have found for data recovery. I have used it to bail many people out. It is not free software though. I would be willing to try and help as a last resort.



I use a combination of firewire and usb devices.

1. Behringer usb audio adapter. Very cheap, works and sounds great. They also have an asio driver for it.

2. ART usb dual pre. Decent for the price and works with the Behringer asio driver.

3. Tascam US1641 USB 2.0 This is a very nice unit but I have had trouble on a couple of machines with AMD processors. The USB controller was not good enough. I also have had to set the latency a little more conservatively in order to avoid dropouts when recording 8 channels.

4. Presonus Firestudio Tube This is an incredible device. Up to 4 Firestudio devices as well as their mixers can be chained together for more inputs. I will use nothing else when the recording matters. The mic pres are sweet and the ASIO drivers are stable. I get very low latency with my desktop. It also works fine with my old 1.6 ghz dual core laptop. The laptop has a TI firewire controller (TI is the best that I have found). My PC has built in firewire but there are many dropouts. A TI based PCI card solved that problem.

All of these devices can be a pain if you have a non-compatible chipset. Some manufacturers such as Presonus list chipsets that work as well as ones that don't.

[jcmbowman]

Sorry dude, that's hella frustrating.

We just lost a ton of "backup" data on a Western Digital My Book Live 2TB NAS. It was purchased 3 weeks ago and got the dreaded blue dot of death. Western Digital says to go pay some third party $1000 to get the data off the drive. And then send them the drive and they'll send a new one (which will probably do the same crap eventually).

I spent around 10 hours over the last two days trying all kinds of tools and Linux distros and data recovery software... can't even mount the partition that has all the data.

Friggin computers.

Just a thought - In my 15+ years doing tech support for my day job, in almost 95% of instances the failure point for external drives (whether USB, firewire, or NAS) is the controller chipset, not the actual hard drive. If you're not able to get the drive to mount, and you care more about the data than the warranty, crack the case open and pull the drive out and out it on a reliable interface. (We use something similar to this: Docking station) Then try using the recovery software. As a plus, once you have a docking station like that, you can just buy a bare drive, plug it in, and use it for storage. If you're really concerned about backup, get 2 drives, and rotate the backup drives out every couple weeks or so to an off-site location. Just make sure to store bare drives in the static bags.

Unfortunately, this won't work if your NAS uses a proprietary chipset to bridge 2 drives together, or if it encodes the data in a non-standard way. But, we've had success with this method with tons of cheapo WD MyBook and similar external drives. And from the looks of it, your drive is just a single drive with a fancy NAS chipset, so this should work for it.

[Frederic Gelinas]

[quote="CraigsAudio"
4. Presonus Firestudio Tube This is an incredible device.
...
Some manufacturers such as Presonus list chipsets that work as well as ones that don't.[/quote]

I'll look for this one. For now, I will just continue to use the M-Audio until I have a more serious recording session to do. Thanks for the input.

[gdougherty]

Sorry dude, that's hella frustrating.

We just lost a ton of "backup" data on a Western Digital My Book Live 2TB NAS. It was purchased 3 weeks ago and got the dreaded blue dot of death. Western Digital says to go pay some third party $1000 to get the data off the drive. And then send them the drive and they'll send a new one (which will probably do the same crap eventually).

I spent around 10 hours over the last two days trying all kinds of tools and Linux distros and data recovery software... can't even mount the partition that has all the data.

Friggin computers.

Unless you don't mind if it all goes away, don't store anything on a hard drive without a backup. Lesson learned. Hard drives fail, period.

[bzb]

Yep, this was for my wife's work. Her and her boss both wanted to access Quickbooks Multi while either was off at a job site, so I suggested a network drive. Got it all setup for them, and totally forgot to set the Carbonite to backup that drive.

I spent about 10 hours trying everything to mount the partition, but WD and the forums were no help. Tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. and their related tools. Tried to mount it directly in OSX. Then bought another WD My Book, and swapped the controllers - the new drive booted right up on both, but the "dead" one wouldn't on either.

Strange this was, I was able to mount the RAID1 Linux partitions, just not the big 1.8TB partition that was supposedly ext4. Thanks for the all the suggestions, but even with my supernerd friends on Facebook, no one knew how to mount the stupid thing.

Anyway, she's had to re-enter everything from the last three weeks... but at least they are backup up nightly now. Yay Cloud.