Fed Up With Firewire 410, What's a reliable alternative for a Powerbook? Options

[stimpy]

The 410 has never really worked. Every driver has some kind of issue. Hanging MIDI notes; Loss of audio monitoring, being just the most recent things. It's well spec'd, but doesn't deliver. They've had long enough to get it right..

I need something with solid dependability, low latency and the usual. I'll move away from Cubase and Garageband and get a new DAW.

WHAT'S GOOD?

MBox 2 Pro? At least it'd come with a good DAW..
or
MOTU UltraLite? and maybe get Logic Express or something?..

[stimpy]

I thought I'd expand on a couple of the hurdles I've encountered, in case someone's struggling with similar problems.

As well as very unstable MIDI performance it had high latency and hanging notes (which as an issue stood for a LONG time; months, until there came a driver version that ran better with Cubase, and others).

I still have to go into the 410s virtual mixer and click the spd button (on the Analogue In bus) on and off, just to get direct monitoring to come through. Otherwise I can't hear the instrument plugged in.
As you can imagine that took ages to find out. MAD!

I've had this since they came out, as one of the first proper portable 1394 boxes. I've ran this unit on 2 macs, and don't generally update the OSs, as it's potluck if it renders the driver useless. Sometimes it disappears from Audio MIDI Setup. It all seems to be a popular experience (posts on versiontracker.com driver page say similar). I like M-Audio stuff. The 410 looks good and sounds good, but in use..

BUT if it works for you, cool..