Firewire and SAC

Discussions about the use and operation of SAC (Software Audio Console)

Firewire and SAC

Postby alephtaph » Sun Jul 01, 2012 8:15 am

Hi to all
I am completly new with SAC and digital Audio in general. I really want to give it a try but generaly working with Mac. I am testing it at the moment on a virtual machine and I am happy so far.
My question what are the expiriences with using an audio interface with firewire connections life the Presonus Firestudio, or do I really need to run it with PCMCI or any PCI sound card?

Thanks for all your help and give me some light in the dark ;-)
Cheers
Marco
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby mattseymour » Sun Jul 01, 2012 4:54 pm

You can use SAC with any audio interface that's reliable at sufficiently low latency. Some have got good mileage with firewire interfaces. It tends to depend on the interface in question and the firewire chipset on your machine.

Some Just don't work. I don't know about the firestudio.

The focusrite saffire 26io I have is useless for SAC. A motu 828 works well.

Basic rule of thumb is if you want a larger channel count and reliability you're best off with a pci card solution.
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby muzicman0 » Mon Jul 02, 2012 9:34 am

I used 2 Focusrite Saffire Pro 40's for quite a while that worked well. I still use them, but only as my preamps. I had no problem with them, but I wanted to get to a buffer of 1x32, so I had to go PCIe.
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby mattseymour » Tue Jul 03, 2012 12:19 pm

Interesting. Maybe the 40s are better with my 26io I tried XP and win 7, four different hardware sets and three different FireWire chipsets. Just would not work.
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby sjpaul » Tue Jul 03, 2012 12:21 pm

I had a system on the go for a while using an M audio Profire as the interface and a 2nd one as a standalone expander to give 16 channels. I could only get decent performance from a 1 x 128 buffer size as the lowest latency setting running Win 7.
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby gdougherty » Tue Jul 03, 2012 4:09 pm

sjpaul wrote:I had a system on the go for a while using an M audio Profire as the interface and a 2nd one as a standalone expander to give 16 channels. I could only get decent performance from a 1 x 128 buffer size as the lowest latency setting running Win 7.

Depends on the host. I'm running 1x64 on a dell e5520 with a 2.5GHz i5 processor. My old Lenovo ran 1x64 just fine as well. I had to do some major tweaking on the Dell to hit 1x64 stably though and I still slip buffers though nothing audible.
http://softwareaudioconsole.wikidot.com The start of a wiki. It's slow going and there's a ton of info that should be in there yet.
Biggest item is the Command Reference on how to do most actions within SAC. It's 90% of what you need for UI proficiency.

g is for George
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Re: Firewire and SAC

Postby sjpaul » Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:21 am

I should have clarified George...

This was running on a MacBook pro using Win7 via boot camp. I should also say that it was just a quick n dirty test to see if it would work (which it did just fine, I ran it for a full gig) but I hadn't done any windows optimisation tweaks..
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