My previous posts were about the Presonus unit and not being able to get it to work right with Cubase LE and it just plain had issues as a sound card.
Presonus Firestudio Project and Cubase LE4
Well, I returned the Presonus Firestudio Project a couple of weeks ago and got this new M-Audio Fastrack Ultra 8R unit to use with Protools M-Powered 7.4, loaded on the same PC that the Presonus and Cubase was installed on.
A patch was downloaded for 7.4 due to the 8R being so new. The patch didn't work right, so we uninstalled Protools, reinstalled it, loaded the patch.
After all that, the 8R with Protools works like a charm. The preamps work fine. The best part is that it's a plug-in-and-record-the-music kind of thing without all the hassle we had with the Presonus and Cubase, and to be fair, the Presonus was probably defective.
Toyed with getting the M-Audio Profire 2626 firewire version, but the 8R can be had for $400, where the firewire version is $600. And the 8R is USB 2.0, which has a higher data rate transfer than the 2626. Plus not all PC's have the firewire port.
Got a couple songs recorded within half an hour of getting the thing up and running. So a pleasurable experience.