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Has anyone had any luck getting the M-Audio Ozonic to work properly with Windows 7?

I have a new Sony Vaio F Series : i7 Core, 6gb RAM, FireWire S400 : Ricoh Interface (using the legacy drivers)

I can get it to recognise the device on boot-up, but it's so temperamental and often decides to just stop working, if I try different audio applications sometimes it just decides it doesn't want to work.

Am I onto a loser with this? Didn't even consider it wouldn't work and went for this laptop BECAUSE it had FireWire but some simple searching around has thrown up some results that the Ricoh firewire interface is rubbish! So it appears all FW interfaces are not equal. Pathetic!

Just to note, I've installed ASIO4ALL drivers. I've disabled all the sound on the laptop as that was causing some issues with interference. If I unplug the device and try and plug back in I get a Blue Screen of death.

Is there anything I can do? I am completely loath to have to sell the Ozonic as it is a very good device... and I can't get rid of a £1000 computer :-/

Would dual-booting into a 64bit Version of XP help?

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2 Answers

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As far as I'm aware, there have been long standing problems with Windows 7 and FireWire devices (a quick Google search will turn up a lot). This especially applied to external hard drives, but I suppose it could apply to all FireWire devices.

Here is what I would do to give the best chance of it working:

  1. Get the latest drivers for the FireWire interface itself from Ricoh's website.
  2. Uninstall ASIO4ALL - only use this as a last ditch attempt when your audio interface manufacturer doesn't provide dedicated ASIO drivers (which M-Audio helpfully does).
  3. Download and install the latest driver for your Ozonic from M-Audio's driver page.
  4. Now restart your machine and see how you get on.

In essence, my advice is to trust the equipment manufacturer to "know best" in terms of drivers for their hardware. ASIO4ALL can be great. ASIO4ALL can be really bad too (I dare say a few of those Blue Screens of Death were caused by it).

You can use WhoCrashed to analyse and diagnose Windows kernel panics (the technical term for Blue Screen of Death). This should give you some helpful pointers as to which device to concentrate your troubleshooting efforts on.

Don't be tempted to dual boot into Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64. Driver support for those operating systems is probably even more temperamental, since there was no wide spread industry adoption of them.

I would also try getting in touch with M-Audio directly. I see you've been on their forums already here which is a great start.

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Since you already have quite an investment in hardware, and your laptop doesn't seem to have a PC Card slot, you might want to try researching something along the lines of an adapter to plug your Firewire device into the USB ports on your computer.

A quick search on Google for a cable or simple adapter didn't turn up any promising results, as most of the cables do not convert USB to Firewire and some actually damaged the hardware when the attempt was made. However, I did find a USB to PC Card adapter, and PC Card Firewire interfaces are readily available.

I have never tried this, but as long as the store you buy from has a good return policy, you should be able to at least experiment a bit.

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My laptop has an Express Card Slot, but from what I have heard getting a Firewire Express Card does NOT resolve this issue. Would it make a difference if I dual-booted into a 64 bit version of XP? – beebul Jul 1 '11 at 14:05
I have found that the driver support for an OS other than what the system came with is usually not good. You may find that the Firewire card would work, but something else (usually the video or network card) does not. That being said, I would try it and see what happens. – Friend Of George♦ Jul 1 '11 at 14:13
Well I would only use XP for Audio production anyway, just want to find a solution that doesn't involve me having to get rid of the Ozonic! – beebul Jul 1 '11 at 14:16
You can't really "convert" between the two protocols of FireWire and USB. Doing so would both remove the advantages of both, and heighten the disadvantages of both! – JayP Dec 29 '11 at 10:27
@JayP It definitely is not an ideal solution to ever use an adapter from one technology to another, but sometimes it does work well enough to get by. – Friend Of George♦ Dec 29 '11 at 14:38

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