Ok, Damian, in that case, here's the long, sad story:

I bought a firewire 410 three years ago based on my happiness with a m-audio mobilepre usb, and my need for more ins and outs. First disappointment was, you can't hot plug it. It must be plugged in at boot time, or it might fry your firewire. I learned to live with that, and used it with my G4 iBook on osx 10.3 and 10.4 with Pd and jack and core audio in various combinations, and it usually worked fine, and was my main interface for a couple years.

Then I needed to run a patch in Max/MSP runtime, and it could not find the 410. So I updated the driver. The driver for osx 10.4.11 is _still_ in beta. Hmm. Then the firmware wouldn't upload, so it wouldn't work in Pd or anything else. So I downgraded, no luck. I eventually did a clean install of 10.4 and progressively tried each os update with it's respective driver. No luck. Then my iBook wouldn't boot, then would boot sometimes and then crash. Good thing I had just made a back up! Replaced the HD (I'm way OT now!) Same behavior.

Was the problem a flaky iBook all along? Well, I have another G4 iBook, and I tested with that, and my wife has a MacBook, no luck there either. Maybe my 410 is just broken. I know there have been some driver issues, and a long wait for a 10.5 driver. There is no Linux support! I'd like to test it on a windows machine to see if it works there.

SO, to speak on-topic, it works fine with Pd, if it works at all and doesn't fry your iBook! ;) I would just avoid it.

I bought a edirol fa-101, which "just works" with osx and doesn't use a driver. Hot pluggable too. Has more ins. It is made of metal. Fully supported on linux (according to the freebob folks, I haven't tried it there yet.) And it works on the Max/MSP patch that got me started down this road. It did not resurrect my iBook, (but it can cure lepers ;))

your, Collin

Damian Stewart wrote:

Collin Oldham wrote:

...

are you looking for a firewire interface? I have a long sad story about a m-audio firewire 410, which I will otherwise spare you. I'm now using an edirol fa-101, so far happily.

Hi Colin,

well, the situation with me is, i'm doing audio for a friend's school project, and we need some way of doing multi-channel audio - the proposal is that she buys the audio interface and i buy it off her at some stage in the future (when i have some cash).

we're actually looking at an m-audio firewire card, because it's reasonably cheap and comes recommended. are you saying the M-audio doesn't play nice with Pd? or does the sadness come from something else?

thanks d