If You Can Answer This, Then You Are The Audio Gur, FW 101 eating up seamingly CPU Options

[red_books]

i have a dual 1.8 g5 tower with 3 gigs of ram running mac os 10.3.9. im currently recording/producing an album and a soundtrack for an indie film. i recently bought an edirol fa-101 so i'd have a high quality recording interface. everything was working pretty well for a little while. now, whenever my edirol is on it eats at my reason cpu meter. i watch the meter as im in reasons soun preferences. when i click back on my internal audio (default) as the main out put my reason cpu usage bar drops to nothing, like it always used to. right when i click my edirol back on as the main out, it jumps more then 5 bars and clocks out on songs that used to be a breeze. reasons stops and tells me i have too slow of a computer, my eye twitches and i lose more hair. also, all the files i was working on with revision cause i needed something with a video track that has rewire (dont really like logic, love ableton live) while working on soundtracks no longer play properly. everything now plays in a highter pitch, but when i close both programs and open the original reason file its all ok and plays how it should. im really trying to figure out whether its my os (which i just recently re-installed), my computer (mayber theres something bad goin on under the hood), etc. i really have no clue. all i know is that ive invested over 7 grand in a computer, sound system, etc that is just plain not working. anyone? anything?

[arvidtp]

yeah - check the sample rate - my firebox, which also uses apple's OS firewire interface drivers, will eat my powerbook CPU for lunch if set to 88 or 96k!

Also a higher bitrate interface with more I/O should draw a little more CPU power for just its operation. But only a little.

Something that I find with my Firebox is that certain apps like MaxMSP like to be re-niced (I use process wizard) to top priority - that makes them behave better when using the firebox - less clicks and pops.

Best of luck.