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Old 07-04-2020, 01:46 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Fast track is unknown device

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen View Post
I use the 2i2 on mac. The mac OS has something called CoreAudio that many interfaces can use, which means you don't really need to install any driver. It just works. I don't know about Windows.
To be clear here, but a digression...

On Windows for any Pro Tools interface you should look for interfaces where the manufacture provides an ASIO driver. Run far and fast from any interface that does not have a ASIO driver. And I don't care about what Pro Tools First or anything else says about WASAPI or other driver support on Windows.... or trying to use ASIO4ALL to wrap other drivers to look like ASIO... all that stuff is a fluster puck, you want a high quality ASIO driver supported by the interface vendor.. and a good part of selecting interfaces for Windows is how good are those drivers and how good is the vendors at supporting/providing updates to the drivers. (for that Focusrite maybe gets middling grades, with some driver install issues? the same ones the OP likely have heard about. but I'm unclear if they have been fixed.. I don't use their interfaces and don't work on Windows much). What is your budget and what do you need to do? For a replacement of the mAudio the 2i2 is a nice match, and will be noticeably better. But if you want to spend more money lots of other brands are out there and have good support and more features, including say UAD Apollo and MOTU interfaces.

So for example the 2i2, which is a nice little interface, works fine on a mac with no customer driver installed. On a Windows PC you have to install the driver they provide (make sure you download the correct driver for the generation of 2i2). On a Mac a 2i2 is using a device driver, but it's the generic USB CoreAudio driver build into the operating system.. only because Focusrite followed the rules from Apple to make the 2i2 work with that generic driver.

On a Mac Pro Tools (well mostly... Ultimate/HD hardware is a bit special, and just about everything else) uses CoreAudio, the macOS built in audio framework. On Windows, Pro Tools and some other DAWs uses ASIO as their audio framework... ASIO is *not* default Windows built in audio framework... (that's currently WDM or WASAPI... depending on what is being talked about).

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 07-04-2020 at 04:17 PM.
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