You can buy a firewire interface, I think they're pretty cheap nowadays.
I think one advantage of firewire is that USB has some overhead associated with managing the bus from the OS.
This part I'm a little shaky on, so someone please tell me if I'm wrong-- if you're trying to deal with low latency with USB it's impossible to tell the OS to prioritize traffic going over USB to the connected USB audio interface but at the same time deprioritize traffic going over that same USB hub to other connected devices. So a crappy driver for a usb laser mouse can cause problems even if everything is working perfectly with the audio interface. But I may be completely misremembering what I learned about USB awhile back...
On a somewhat related note-- I think there is still some BIOS stuff related to power management (esp. on laptops) that are not affected by even the real time kernel patches. Those latencies that the BIOS introduces are just a result of however well (or poor) the stuff was written that ships with the machine you're using. If it was written very inefficiently then you're just stuck with it no matter what OS you use. Yet another in a long list of reasons to have control over the software that runs in your machine!
-Jonathan
----- Original Message -----
From: patrick puredata@11h11.com To: Pure Data list pd-list@iem.at Cc: Sent: Monday, October 15, 2012 7:17 PM Subject: [PD] firewire is dead?
hi all,
i have a firepod 1010 firewire soundcard, i am using linux / jack. the new motherboard doesn't have firewire. what to do?
also will i be able to lower the latency even more if i have a faster cpu? or it's really the firewire / soundcard limitation? what it the lowest latency soundcard for linux available on the market? i might consider to make a move towards usb.
pat
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list