I've heard a lot of bad reviews of the MAudio FW410 and mac. Does anyone have any experience with it?

I have one and it's the best interface I've used. There are some issues with sleep on the mac, after which it 'can' sometimes crash the OS. However, I don't experience this because I'm using a laptop set never to go to sleep (which is wise for audio).

The routing software is flexible and easy to use.

I've really found it to be excellent, and M-Audio offer frequent updates to the drivers and are active in finding solutions to problems.

I have had one since they came out and in my experience it has worked well and is built very well too. The sound is great and has been more than adequate the only complaints I have has were originally the OEM version of Ableton Delta Live would not recognize the soundcard but this was fixed with a new CD in the mail and it is a crippled version of Live which was usless for me. More importantly though the drivers have been a pain in the ass, they have always been functional but not ideal, however, this seems to be fixed now...

Personally, I recomend it but would have prefered a 10 in 4 out.

This post has been edited by eMpTy: Thu 6 May 2004, 20:29

I like my FW 410. It works great in 10.3.2 using with Ableton Live 3 and DP 4.

No problems yet, although you can check my other posts regarding some of
the misunderstandings I had with the software interface and the mono input
setup in Live 3. All is resolved now though.

I use the M-Audio FW 410 with my Mac G4, OS X 10.3.3, running Logic 6 Platinum. I've not had any problem in over 6 months. It's been a solid, stable, and reliable device. I recommend it.

I bought one last week and I am impressed. It is great.

That said, it has some issues with the Mac OS X drivers, but they are more a nuisance than anything really serious.

It has some difficulty to initialise when connected to the Firewire bus. I must connect it twice (I mean, connect-disconnect-connect) to have it recognised by the driver. After that, I can connect the two Lacie D2 hard drives and everything works.

However, it might have problems depending on the disk activity, due to limitations in the Firewire bandwidth.

I have just updated the system to Mac OS X 10.3.4 and it is working well with the latest driver from M-Audio. 10.3.4 corrects, according to Apple, some issues when capturing DV video through Firewire. It might have an effect (good, I hope!) on Firewire audio interfaces if it is a tweak of the Firewire drivers.

I have one since it came out, and everything was working perfectly until I upgraded the driver to the latest (built 1082) Since then something is really wrong, it keeps on quitting on almost any software I use, cubase SX, live and reason. And I don't seem to find the solution, I am in contact with M-audio, and they suggeted me to unistall and reinstall everything, repair permissions, but the quittings keep on coming. anybody has any experince like this? until driver built 1068 and 10.3.2 everything was sweet but now...

Have you got more drivers installed? More Firewire peripherals?

Have a look at the /var/log/system.log file. It can give a clue about the origin of the problem. Probably some errors will be logged there.

I have a firewire800 lacie external drive and I usually plug my iPod to the 410 but not in this case. Where do I find /var/log/system log file? thanks

I was also dissatisfied with the latest driver update (build 1080), so I went back to the previous version, which to me seems to be the best so far.
There are issues with getting the drivers to recognize the unit, when it is attached. like Borjam said, sometimes it needs to be reconnected a couple of times. I have found however, that it usually works best if I connect the FW410 while my Powerbook is on standby. When it wakes up, it usually recogninzes the interface every time.
Overall I've been satisfied with the FW410.