My Presonus Firepod has arrived....

[reaiken]

Unfortunately, I am down in Pensacola, FL at the moment and can't check it out....

I'll let you guys know how well it works with an HP Pavilion ZT1180 laptop (an older machine with a 1.2GHz P3 and firewire port). Stay tuned....

Randall Aiken

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by reaiken
Unfortunately, I am down in Pensacola, FL at the moment and can't check it out....

I'll let you guys know how well it works with an HP Pavilion ZT1180 laptop (an older machine with a 1.2GHz P3 and firewire port). Stay tuned....

Randall Aiken

I'll be interested in your thoughts. After a couple false starts (I had 2 of the first 15 units with bad firmware), I was contacted by Presonus and signed on as part of their artist program so I'm getting another firepod in a few days...

Jaz

 

[reaiken]

Well, the first disappointment - the supplied firewire cable has a big 6-pin connector on each end (two shielded twisted pairs for data and power), and my laptop has a small 4-pin firewire connector (two shielded twisted pairs for data and no power). Off to the computer store to get a 6-pin to 4-pin cable. I hope this will work with my laptop! I assume the Firepod doesn't need the firewire power, because it comes with a nice big 15V/2A floor-wart supply.

Randall Aiken

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by reaiken
Well, the first disappointment - the supplied firewire cable has a big 6-pin connector on each end (two shielded twisted pairs for data and power), and my laptop has a small 4-pin firewire connector (two shielded twisted pairs for data and no power). Off to the computer store to get a 6-pin to 4-pin cable. I hope this will work with my laptop! I assume the Firepod doesn't need the firewire power, because it comes with a nice big 15V/2A floor-wart supply.

Randall Aiken

Same thing happened when I bought my maudio fw410. They now ship with 2 firewire cables. Maudio can be powered off either the firewire 6 pin device or it's external supply. With it's 8 mic preamps, the Firepod can only be powered by the external supply. If you notice, it's a 20 watt power supply! Most firewire ports supply about 500ma max!.

 

[reaiken]

Okay, $30 later, I'm up and running! ($30 for a 3 ft firewire 6-4 cable??? And you thought guitar cables were expensive!!!).

The Presonus driver install went smoothly, as did the Cubase install, Cubase sees the Firepod, and I'm getting audio in and out of the computer on ch1 and ch2. Yay!

Now it looks like I'll have to read the manual to figure out how to get anything happening on the rest of the channels - Cubase is not very intuitive at all, at least to a first-timer.

More to come, but so far so good...

Randall Aiken

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by reaiken
Okay, $30 later, I'm up and running! ($30 for a 3 ft firewire 6-4 cable??? And you thought guitar cables were expensive!!!).

The Presonus driver install went smoothly, as did the Cubase install, Cubase sees the Firepod, and I'm getting audio in and out of the computer on ch1 and ch2. Yay!

Now it looks like I'll have to read the manual to figure out how to get anything happening on the rest of the channels - Cubase is not very intuitive at all, at least to a first-timer.

More to come, but so far so good...

Randall Aiken

I'm enjoying mine. The only issue I have is that Sonar sees the channels in a funny way. This is probably a registry issue but I get:

Left Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 12 Left
Right Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 12 Left
Stereo Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 12 Left
Left Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 34 Left
Right Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 34 Left
Stereo Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 34 Left
Left Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 56 Left
Right Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 56 Left
Stereo Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 56 Left
Left Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 78 Left
Right Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 78 Left
Stereo Presonus ASIO Driver LineIn 78 Left

From trial and error I figured out that left is the odd number channels and right is the even numbered channels.

I didn't try the stereo setting so I'm not sure what that does.

I'm going to send this info to Presonus. Perhaps I can change something in the registry to make this more obvious.

Jaz

 

[reaiken]

Okay, after reading the manual, it is very easy to assign channels in the mixer, and I now have tested all 8 mic inputs. I think I'm going to like this thing! Very big bang for the buck. I can see lots of wasted time in my future....

Randall Aiken

 

[jzucker]

Yeah, i'm diggin' it too. The instrument inputs sound very nice too. I can get a great sound going direct in the first two channels with the instrument preamps. I like the fact that the line-ins for channels 3-8 are in the front of the unit.

Very cool, great sounding mic preamps and very good DACs.

 

[Guitarzan]

I'm looking at the firepod and was wondering if you are using XP with service pack 2? Most of the stuff I'm looking at like the Firepos, MBOX etc., all say not approved for service pack 2 yet. I already have sp2 on my computer. Just curious.

Thanx!

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
I'm looking at the firepod and was wondering if you are using XP with service pack 2? Most of the stuff I'm looking at like the Firepos, MBOX etc., all say not approved for service pack 2 yet. I already have sp2 on my computer. Just curious.

Thanx!

Do you have a specific need for SP2? If not, uninstall it and go back to SP1A.

The biggest issue with SP2 is that it has code in it that runs firewire 800 at 1/8th speed. Most firewire 800 devices can run at full speed with special drivers in SP1 but it's tricky to get them working with SP2.

Additionally, SP2 precludes self modifying code to run by default. Some poorly written software such as Sonar makes use of this and will not run under SP2 unless you utilize the advanced compatibility mode options.

By the way, I wouldn't bother with Mbox. The Pro Tools software is vastly overrated and buggy and it's an insult to charge $500 for USB1 speeds. When you spend that kind of dough and then find out that you can't monitor effects in real time due to the slowness of USB you'll really regret it.

 

[Guitarzan]

cool, how do you uninstall service pack 2? So you like the firepod then?

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
cool, how do you uninstall service pack 2? So you like the firepod then?

If you installed the SP2 on top of another version, you can go into control panel->add/remove programs and uninstall it.

Regarding the firepod, I love it. It's an unbelievable deal for the money and their support is top notch.

I'm so enamered with the thing that I am now an endorser for Presonus.

 

[Guitarzan]

This will be my first computer based system and everywhere here in LA tells me I'm stupid if I don't get Pro Tools. THey say eventually I'll have to. Are you using Cubase? How is it? I have no experience with any of them so I'm trying to make sure I buy something I won't be immediately second guessing.

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
This will be my first computer based system and everywhere here in LA tells me I'm stupid if I don't get Pro Tools. THey say eventually I'll have to. Are you using Cubase? How is it? I have no experience with any of them so I'm trying to make sure I buy something I won't be immediately second guessing.

I was extremely unimpressed with Pro Tools LE which is what you get for any system under $2000 from Digidesign. If you have $5k to spend, Pro Tools HD is an industry standard and they were the first professional digital recording package to run on MAC and so they have a pretty big footprint. However, the Pro Tools Limited Edition you get with the $500 Mbox or the $1200 Digi002R was quirky and buggy. Crashed frequently.

With Pro Tools 6.1, One bug that amazed me that it was allowed to get past QA was when you created a new project and then decided to quit. You got one dialog asking if you were sure, a 2nd dialog telling you you'd be losing your changes and then a program error dialog (called an assertion box in the industry). This assertion box warned that an unexpected error had occured in one of the C++ source files and gave the line number of the error. When you pressed OK (no other options) you were back in Pro Tools. There was no way to quit without saving!

In the $1200 hardware/software price range Pro Tools has the least amount of functionality compared to Cubase and Sonar.

Their customer support was also extremely poor and they were not very knowledgeable about the PC products.

Unless you can afford a $5000 HD system, I would not recommend Pro Tools on the PC.

One additional thing. Pro tools comes with WDM and ASIO drivers. The WDM driver is the one that windows uses for direct sound (i.e. playback through media player)

The WDM driver they provide never did work on my machine. I spent over a week going back and forth with their support folks were were clueless about how to get it to work. Two of their support folks told me in exasperation,

It should just work!

Duh...

FWIW, the Digi002R hardware was very good quality but for the money you could get a Firepod and Sonar or Cubase which would give you way more functionality in hardware and software.

 

[Guitarzan]

So, I ordered a firepod. I should have it in a few days. I'm curious as to what other programs i should start looking for. What plugins, and especially what drum and other instrument programs should I get. This is all new to me.

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
So, I ordered a firepod. I should have it in a few days. I'm curious as to what other programs i should start looking for. What plugins, and especially what drum and other instrument programs should I get. This is all new to me.

I'm using Sonar but you can get a great deal on Adobe Audition 1.5 from www.guygraphics.com ($125)

It's hard to beat that. Sonar Producer comes with quite a few plug-ins. The firepod comes with Cubase LE.

If I were to do it all over again, I'd probably start out with Cubase instead of sonar. Eventually, I'd like to get nuendo.

 

[Guitarzan]

So, I got my firepod. It sounds great but, it has some issues. They are trying to figure out how to get me a new one before i leave for tour on thursday. I think I am really going to like it once I get one that I can use fully.

 

[jzucker]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
So, I got my firepod. It sounds great but, it has some issues. They are trying to figure out how to get me a new one before i leave for tour on thursday. I think I am really going to like it once I get one that I can use fully.

What issues?

 

[Guitarzan]

the third channel clips constantly even when nothing plugged into it. And mainly the 2nd or Right main output does not work. I've already talked to them and they said its definately the unit. I'm waiting for word back form them on the solution.

 

[MichaelK]

Originally posted by Guitarzan
the third channel clips constantly even when nothing plugged into it. And mainly the 2nd or Right main output does not work.

<coff>