are you using your internal laptop hd? (5400rpm).
might be the cause, had same problem with my fw motu interface, external hd (7200rpm) solved those problems..
cheers
huub

provided FW 400 cord???

I suggest getting a FW 800 cord to take advantage of the available banwidth.

Do you have a seperate Audio drive?

With a kit from Wiebetech you can add up to 10 SATA drives to G5
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/G5Jamplus.php

8)

I don't know how this works on a Mac, but you will wanna make sure your hard drives are running in DMA Mode 5. I have seen this happen to two separate DAWs that had stuttering and skipping on playback. When installing a 2nd harddrive, they defaulted to PIO mode which really screwed up playback. If it looks like your cursor in your recording software is having a hard time keeping up with playing back your file, then you should definitely take a close look at your hard drive setup.

Your best bet is to go to the RME forums.

I suspect you have a new G5 dual 2GHZ. There has been some reported problem with them and the frontside bus architecture. This is the G5's with the PCI slots not the PCI-X slots.

At the MAC OS audio site people with the same setup reported no problems. It might be a hit and miss thing.

I was going to send you a thread but the site is down for a few days.

What software are you using? This may have something to do with it.

What is your FF800's latency set to? 3ms is the lowest I usually go on my Multiface, but I usually set it to 6ms while tracking for a "comfort zone", and use the Totalmix to get a latency free Headphone mix.

If you are using the 1.5ms latency (or possibly the 3ms latency) this may be part of your issue...

:cool:

Also, Tiger OS may or may not have a lot of peripheral apps running that are CPU intensive. I know there are ways to optimise the mac for audio. Search the web.

1gig should be enough RAM but TIGER is a new OS. Most people I know of doing audio with the G5 have twice this much.

Randyman's comment should be the first thing you look into ( if you haven't already that is).

With my PC I had the multiface and fireface plugged in at the same time and had the same problem until I made sure they were both locked in at the same latency. I don't know if this is relevant to you. If you had another card installed prior to the Fireface this could be worth looking into.

Thanks for your responses everyone!

I have further isolated the problem, or at least the symptoms.

The clicks and pops are only coming from analog out channels - 2,4,6,and 8. Channels 1,3,5,7 are crystal clear and beautiful. I tested each channel with both left and right monitors, different cables etc. - the problem is DEFINATELY from the even numbered analog outs.

To answer some questions.

- I am running a separate hard drive for audio, but the clicks and pops are not coming from data saved on it (I have not saved anything yet), the clicks and pops come from CD and mp3 playback in itunes, playback in Reason 2.5 (using a midi usb keyboard to play piano etc.) and playback of DVDs.

- I switched to FW 800 cable and ports - no change!

- I have switched buffer amounts and sample rates - no change

- there is no way that I can tell to change latency in the Fireface settings box, this seems depended on the program and sample rate being used. Does anyone know of a way to do this.

Still no response from RME's support, it's been a week now. I'm starting to wonder about this purchase!!

Thanks again everyone,

-M

Fireface 800

Mallardduckman,

Go back to the previous driver update! Several people on the fireface newsgroup have had similar issues and have resolved them with using older version.