I have been using my FirePod successfully for years on my Windows 7 64-bit system without problems. I am using the latest ASIO drivers, version 5.13.
Now I have the problem of audio dropouts and I can't figure out what is causing it. I am using SONAR X2 Producer for my DAW. Even if SONAR is sitting idle doing "nothing" eventually a dialog box will pop up and state, "The audio engine has been stopped unexpectedly."
When either FirePod is running by itself (i.e. the other unit is not connected and powered off) I have no problems with dropouts. I've tried switching which unit is the master unit and that makes no difference.
1) Increased latency in Firepod control panel.
2) Increased buffers in SONAR from 256 to 512.
3) Disabled background Virus Scanner and services. Note that my CPU is hardly being used when a dropout occurs.
Sample rate is 44.1kHz. Clock Source is "Internal" (no other setting in the dropdown). Didn't make any difference regarding the Latency setting which is currently 4.0ms.
My Firewire interface is Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI.
The new used unit is a "FirePod" so I don't know why it shows up as an "FP 10".
My dedicated audio hard drives are also on Firewire using the same hardware card.
Again, the dropout will occur if SONAR is just sitting idle doing nothing. I don't see any background services interfering and the dropout only occurs when both units are daisy chained - not when each unit is running by itself.
This appears to be a Firewire syncing problem. I have not tried replacing the Firewire cable joining the two units - that cable however is brand new.
Support: Compatible, no known issues.
May have found the answer but I'm still testing. There are issues with the newer OHCI driver on Windows 7 64-bit that are revealed by daisy chaining the FirePods. These issues are resolved by switching to the "Legacy" OHCI driver. I followed the instructions to do this. On my first use of SONAR I got the scary "blue screen of death" due to an interrupt exception. I'm beginning to think something was not completely installed because after the reboot SONAR has been behaving well and I haven't gotten an audio dropout yet.
I'm wondering if there is a newer hardware card I should purchase for Windows 7 64-bit compatibility. Hope everything continues to remain stable.
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PreSonus told me that the OHCI driver with Windows 7 service pack 1 should work and that I should not need the legacy driver. Is that true? Should I use the legacy driver or the newer driver?
I'm still confused about the firmware status. The two units do sync and seem to work together, but is the crash due to one unit not truly having it's firmware updated? The dump seems to indicate an OHCI driver problem.
I can try updating the firmware but I'll need to find an XP machine, which won't be easy.
I'm still looking into updating the firmware. PreSonus tech support though tells me that the firmware difference should not matter. They lean toward a Windows ACPI interrupt sharing problem. The 1394 card, the graphics card, and a USB controller are all sharing IRQ 16. I've never had problems with ACPI before. They recommend moving the 1394 card to another slot in order to have Windows (hopefully) re-assign the card to another IRQ.
I tried using another FireWire port instead of daisy-chaining the FirePods and that made no difference.
PreSonus tech support though tells me that the firmware difference should not matter.
I was successfully able to upgrade the firmware of my FirePod to an FP-10. This did not help to resolve "The audio engine has stopped unexpectedly" problem. I've just about exhausted all ideas. The only thing left is the ACPI interrupt sharing. Unfortunately, my motherboard has a single PCI slot so I can't move the 1394 FireWire card to another slot.
Windows seems to have a bunch of higher level interrupts but I don't think you can force Windows to assign a device to a particular interrupt with ACPI. Perhaps there is a way I can test in "safe mode" and see what triggers the audio dropouts.
What I don't understand is that if the interrupt is truly the issue, then why does each FirePod unit work standalone with SONAR? If this were an interrupt issue wouldn't a single FirePod also have problems?
My motherboard has an internal Intel graphics chipset/driver and therefore I was able to remove the NVIDIA card. Now, only the USB controller shares IRQ 16 with the FireWire card.
In spite of removing the sharing with the video card, I still got audio dropouts, but one FirePod by itself works perfectly.
However, I think I know what the problem is. I currently have two FirePods hooked up along with a dedicated hard drive to a PCI FireWire 400 card.
My motherboard has open PCIe "Express" slots which offer greater speed, do not share a bus with other devices since they have dedicated "lanes", and they support bi-directional communication far better than the older PCI technology.
My current theory is that I don't really have any conflicts or problems in my Windows setup - just that I'm trying to send and receive too much bandwidth through an older PCI card.
Therefore, I'm going to try upgrading to a PCIe (express) x1 card with a Texas Instruments chipset and see if that fixes my audio dropout problem.
Even though I have the PCIe card on order, I may have found the issue. I will have to continue testing for next couple of days.
First, the 1394 OHCI Legacy driver must be used, not the latest Microsoft driver or the Texas Instruments Compliant driver. The latest driver will not cause a BSOD, but it is unusable - audio dropouts. Same with the TI Compliant driver.
Second, when I used the Legacy driver before I got BSODs. However, examination of the dump files revealed two drivers: the legacy 1394 OHCI driver, and, mozy.sys. I use Mozy as a backup service and I thought I had shutdown the Mozy service for my testing. However, mozy.sys is still used by a process called mozystat.exe which still runs in the background even if the service is shutdown.
When I killed that process, SONAR has been running fine. I was able to replicate a BSOD by having SONAR and mozystat.exe running at the same time. Case opened with Mozy but I don't expect a miracle - solution may be to ensure Mozy (and any of its hidden processes) is not running when SONAR is.
1) The latest Microsoft Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver will work with a *single* FirePod on Windows 7 64-bit. Daisy-chaining FirePods does not work with that driver. There is probably an incompatibility issue with the PreSonus driver that is not exposed with a single FirePod.
2) If you install the Unibrain 64-bit driver it does not work with the PreSonus driver at all (i.e. devices are not even recognized).
3) The "Legacy" Microsoft 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver does work and it is the one to use if you are daisy-chaining FirePods. However, this driver does not work well with other third-party drivers (e.g. my Mozy backup system) and you will get BSODs or system lockups if these third-party drivers try to access a FireWire drive using the legacy driver.
4) Obviously I need a stable system - so this is how I solved the problem: I purchased an additional Texas-Instruments chipset compliant FireWire card. For the FirePods I kept them connected to card #1 which is now using the "Legacy" driver. For the dedicated FireWire audio hard drives (which need to be backed up using Mozy) I put them on the card #2 which is using the latest Microsoft Texas-Instruments 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver.
So far this has configuration has been stable. The FirePods work, no audio dropouts, and Mozy can still access the audio drives when I'm not recording to perform a backup without crashing my system.
Glad to hear you're up and running!
I purchased an additional Texas-Instruments chipset compliant FireWire card.
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