Firewire Soundcard Working !?

C

chrisj303

Member
Hi all, I was under the impression that firewire is as of yet unavailable through parallels - yet my M-AUDIO FIRWIRE 410 is DEFINITLEY working,!!!!

Let me expand,
I am running a 2ghz macbook 1ghzRAM, and XP home and XP PRO (parallels).
This evening i have been working on an audio project, using reason and digital performer5. About an hour ago, i finished - booted OUT of said programs - Then stared up XP Home ed. to have a play around with a new VST i picked up today.
The ONLY audio connection i have to my mac is through my firewire soundcard, yet i still heard the login jingle loud and clear.
I then booted up ABLETON LIVE 6 to check if i was getting sound, and BINGO! - i am..

I seem to only be getting channels 1/2 ot of a possible 8, and ableton is not reconising the others?

How is this possible?

Definitley a good sign for the future!
cheers,
TR_606
 
^*****EDIT

After a couple of hours of experimentation, i've found that YES you can get sound O/P from XP via the M AUDIO 410, but in a very arse-about -face kind of way.

I have the drivers installed on both OS's. And obviously, have 410 'checked' as output/input device > (mac)> system prferences.
I then launch the M Audio software interface from osx.

Then i boot XP, then Ableton live.
You will know if it "working" (!) as you will hear the windows jingle.

From ableton live>options>audio. - The app does not display the soundcard. So you have no choice but to leave the default sound driver/output setting.

Sound will be outputted from live via the sound card but only channels 1/2.
Not great work-around, but 2 1/4 jack O/P has got to beat 1 mini jack (at least you have a stereo pair)

It's a real shame regarding firewire support, it's the one thing (apart from lack of parallels customer support) that stopping me ditching boot-camp.

cheers,
chrisj303
 
Direct firewire support would be nice, but even if Parallels were to implement it, you would not be able to have both the Windows VM and the Mac host access the hardware simultaneously. Furthermore, jitter would be an issue because both 'machines' (host and guest) would be running audio off of different master clocks.

That said, I know someone who is doing essentially what you are wanting to do but using a real physical PC and a gigabit ethernet connection along with a plugin called Wormhole (do a google search, it should be easy to find) that routes audio across TCP/IP and has, I believe, some sort of built in comensation for latency and jitter.

Okay, I just did a search for Wormhole, and it is not free, but it is inexpensive, and there is a demo for both Mac and Windows, so you can try it out and see if it works for you. If you do, please report back here and let us know how it goes.
 
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