You can't have ADD and ADHD, well you can but if you have ADHD, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder you already have the Attention Deficit part.

As to the soundcard.
What is this firewire mixer you have? It must only be an ADC and not a DAC... Annoying.
If you can use it for all your ADC requirments then something in the realms of a 2 channel DAC would serve you well, for outputting to your monitors.

Do you have a budget?

I'm looking but I can't find any DAC only USB or firewire sound cards... Some are really expensive like the Apogee Mini-Me and some are cheap like M-Audio Duo or an Edirol UA-1EX.

What sample rate do you record in?

What mixer do you have? I use Audition 3 and PT. If you go into hardware setup in Audition you should then be able to select a properly installed firewire mixer. It must of course be powered up and connected to be seen. I have successfully used Onyx 1640, various M-Audio devices, and Presonus gear as well. Audition just doesn't care what the brand is-it will work. I guess worst case scenario you would have to install ASIO4ALL.

What mixer do you have?

Helix Board 18 FireWire MKII. Here's a link to the product specs: http://www.phonic.com/en/audio-interface/helix-board-18-firewire-mkii.html. In case you were wondering, I got it for half price; I figured I could sell it on Ebay if I didn't like it and make a profit. 8)

Do you have a budget?

Technically, yes. :? I'm out of work at the moment, so cheap is good right now. :evil: I suppose anything better than the Audition sound would be good? Then again, I don't know why the Audition sound is so bad.

From their website about your mixer;

"The MKII mixer features a FireWire interface that can individually stream up to 16 independent channels of audio to the computer and return two tracks for monitoring".

So you shouldn't need another interface.

This is more a problem of setting up Audition.

Well the driver disc I got didn't seem to work, so I downloaded them. I'll try to figure this out... :?

Your Helix board should work with Audition without any problem. You need to get into the hardware setup and select the Phonic ASIO driver. You get there from a couple of different ways depending on whether you are in Edit view or Multitrack view. There will be three tabs at the top and you can select a different ASIO driver for all of them or what most of us do which is select the same driver for all of them. There should be a way to get a 2 track stereo feed back to the Phonic for monitoring. The manual states such anyway.

Well, the weird part is that I can get a monitor feed, but the ASIO isn't there. It must have gotten installed wrong. But now the installation might not be finishing... it just tells me to disconnect and reconnect to complete the installation over and over. I guess that's what I get for buying a cheap mixer? :? Hello customer support.

Just to be sure, I tried to reinstall the drivers for the Helix board, but it never really finished, so when I arm a track for recording it says: "You currently have a DirectSound sound card driver selected (Audition Windows Sound). For best results when recording, select an ASIO sound card driver." Before, the Helix board wasn't listed as an option, now it is, but when I click on it, it says it isn't available... And now it is available 3 seconds later... Darn this being out of work thing. :lol: :evil:

Are you using a PC? When I first used a Mackie Onyx board I had to revert the Windows XP 1394a driver back to the SP1 driver. After I did that everything worked just fine. Perhaps this would help your Helix problems.

Also check out the Black Viper website for tweaking your computer.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

Are you using a PC? When I first used a Mackie Onyx board I had to revert the Windows XP 1394a driver back to the SP1 driver. After I did that everything worked just fine. Perhaps this would help your Helix problems.

I got stuck with Vista. The weird thing is that the mixer works fine except for the ASIO thing.

I'm running three laptops on Vista Ult and one on Win7. Before everyone got onboard with Vista I had to install several firewire sound devices by right clicking then . On Win7 I was able to install a couple things by right clicking and and then selecting XP.

Now Vista was an obnoxious POS until service pack 1 came out so if you did not install SP1 you NEED to do so immediately. If your pc doesn't have web access you can use a different one and download the entire SP in an ISO format and burn it onto a CDR-which is the route I use on audio computers.

Also, it sounds a bit as if your initial install was botched and you should attempt to remove and delete the drivers and start over. Another hint would be to turn off your User Control feature if you are never on the web, and turn it off for installs if you do use the web.

Thanks for the tips, TheJackAttack. I've done most of them already. It just doesn't make sense that the installation finished 99% and then won't go all the way (or at least I think that's what's happening...). I'll check on the Vista service pack, although, I just bought a new Dell, so it is probably the most recent version.

Most of my laptops are Dells despite their sketch rep from the first part of this decade for audio work. Some Dell specific tips would be to do a fresh clean install and do NOT install the extra Dell utilities like the Quickset application. The newer mobos are fairly low latency so when you get it going properly they will be good. On many occasions I've tracked 16 sticks at 88.2 without artifacts so it can be done. Just persevere. Then if you discover anything nifty let us all know so we can add it to our bag of tricks.