M-Audio Fast Track II Avid USB Recording Studio Interface

To All Musicians and Singer Song writers. This product from Avid is totally awesome to install and work with. The USB adapter and software is easy to Install and the quality of the product is tops. I rate it a 10 because of the sound quality and super low noise ratio. M-Audio has a great design and lives up to it's claims. The Bonus is the free copy of PRO TOOLS SE recording software. It makes mastering your creation a breeze. Buy it you won't be sorry. Amazon was so easy to order from and really fast delivery and low price. For further information visit there website.

I use Vista SP2 and the drivers that came off the disk that was included were generating errors and refused to install. The same goes for the most recent drivers off the M-Audio website. However, an older driver provided on the site finally got it up and running. The sound is smooth with no pops or crackling noises like the Behringer product I have. Works perfectly with Cakewalk Sonar Producer Editions 4, 8, and X1(the newest). The Pro Tools SE software included seems to have too much overhead for my taste but I have yet to test it extensively. Overall I'd say for the paltry sum of $40, this is more than worth it to be up and recording again. The phantom power generates no hum for me, contrary to what everyone else is saying. The only con that I have thus far is the driver issue which has been solved.

BIEN

Before getting the Avid Recording Studio, I read many reviews about it and many other interfaces under de $150 range and came to the conclusion that it was going to be a gamble, so I went for the cheapest I could find. This does the job very well!! I do freelance studio work and was looking for a way to work from home. I don't need a million plug-ins, I just need to lay a good quality track I can send them and this delivers just that. Cons, pro-tools SE doesn't include punch options so right now I just do a few takes and try not to make mistakes (good exercise anyway) but will eventually update that. Other than that, this is sweet!

Hey I just used the avid recording studio which has the M-Audio Fast track. I have used my dynamic microphone on it and the quality is GREAT. lol I havnt bought a condensor yet for testing the phantom power because I use a USB condensor. I also use the headphone port for deejaying. It has this thing where instead of putting my converter piece all the way in i have to leave it out a bit. Normally it does 2 "clicks" but I have to make sure I only hear "one click." And the volume for the headphones is a bit low. It cant get really loud but I guess that doesnt matter. I also use it to connect my powered monitors and they sound great!I love this and I think its a great buy for a beginner audio engineer!

Ok. the hardware it's ok. It was the replace for another interface than can not have phantom power, and for the price I think that there are not another with the features that fast track has, I don't gonna to discussed about the audio quality DAC converter, etc. For my needs it has the enough 24 bit 44100 hz, I don't hear differences with superior bit depth or sample rate. Don't expect too much from pro tools SE, it's a very very basic version, the first thing that I notice is the lack of the monitoring by software, fast track has direct monitoring by hardware, but I record guitars and you hear only the clean signal, if you use any effects you cannot monitoring at playback only when recording mode...and there are many features hidden that you can discover by reading the help, but you cannot find in any part of the menu. It comes with a huge collection of loops and virtual instrument that I don't use (I mainly play and record guitars) so I cannot to say to much about that.....so I still and prefer to use reaper like my main DAW!!! the web site of avid don't have to much information about this version of pro tools, you cannot try a demo, sorry by that. If you are looking for get into the serious pro tools world I recommend to check avid mbox interface instead. This interface is not usb 2.0....is usb 1 compatible with usb 2.0, always run at usb 1 speed. Another thing that I take some time to deal was driver issues with nvidia graphics and motherboard intel chipset 945, you're gonna have pops and really annoying hiss sound randomly, but this is common with external usb sounds cards and graphics drivers on some configurations, you have to use your onboard graphics or deal with nvidia tools to tune your graphics card. I already had this trouble with another usb sound card, so it was no big issue for me, but I read really bad reviews about this interface because this.

Icould't get help from vendor to install.

This was an excellent low-noise upgrade from running my sound through the on-board soundcard on my computer. The major upside between this and the stock card is the lower latency, which is CRUCIAL in a recording environment, so needless to say, I'm impressed for this being such a bargain (I bought this during Cyber Week for 75 bucks, so it really WAS a bargain for me). I like being able to adjust recording and output levels on the fly (for the moments when everyone else in the house needs to get my attention). The phantom-power capabilities make it very useful. Note that I'm only reviewing the M-Audio box, and NOT Pro Tools, as my computer is not compatible with it, and I'm already using another editing program.

Let me first temper this review by saying that Pro Tools SE appears to be a very sophisticated and versatile recording package. It's better than the software I have used in the past (ACID Pro). Now to the bad news: - you can't use the software without having the device actually plugged in to your computer. That means that, even if you just want to mix some ready recorded material, you have to have the recording hardware dangling off your machine. If you use a laptop and want to work while on the move, this would be useless. - The software de-activates your soundcard. This would almost be forgivable if it weren't for the aforementioned problem. It's understandable that you need to deactivate the sound so that you don't get feedback. However, the following problem ruins the device for me. - Some sound won't play back properly. For example, if I have the machine plugged in and I load Spotify, it sounds fine. If I load Youtube, it sounds crackly and utterly horrible. (I am not an audiophile, but Youtube is unusable with the device connected.) Now, the best way to learn how to use pro tools is to watch the (admittedly excellent) tutorials on Youtube. You can't do this with the recording studio plugged in, so you have to save all of your work, shut down pro tools, unplug the device, watch the Youtube video, try to remember what you learned, reconnect, reload pro tools and then apply what you learned in the video - if you can remember that is... It's terrible. Software should not work this way. I can understand the manufacturer wishing to protect its intellectual property, by limiting pro tools to machines that use avid's hardware, but I can also understand that people stuck with this machine will resort to hacked pirate software to get around this sort of control. I don't think anyone benefits from that. There are, otherwise, a lot of good things I could say about this product. However, the above is completely unforgivable in my opinion and negates any positive points. I will probably just send this device back for a refund. Disappointing.

software doesn't work and the delay in sounds means recording is poor. OK its cheap but I was expecting better.

It's an okay product but the drivers seem to really let it down. The older drivers for Windows 7 would sometimes disconnect the device and force me to replug the USB in order to get it working again. Now on Windows 8 with an updated driver, I sometimes end up having to change the frequency from 44 to 48 just to get desktop audio working. It works for a while and then randomly forgets the sound mode so I have to do it again! Very annoying! After some quite light use, I have found the volume output knob is making a crackling sound when I adjust the level. I've read that this can be fixed by removing the knob and cleaning the pot underneath, but I'll not bother unless it becomes really bad. Drivers and crackling aside, the actual quality of sound in and out is good and it does what I want it to do... record my microphone and play it back in good quality. UPDATE: After 3 years, the audio output has stopped working. The mic and line still work fine, which is odd because you'd expect failure to be both ways. I opened the device and could not detect anything wrong with it. With vendor drivers, it causes BSOD... with Windows update drivers, it still works as a mic input. I wouldn't ever buy M-Audio/Avid products again, not just because of how awful their driver support is, but because this unit has basically been falling apart since I took it out of the box. It is tacked on to a work top and has hardly been moved since I've had it, so it's not through my own fault this unit failed.

I've recorded my own music for many years (I'm now in my 60s) and have used many methods over those years. 2 1/2 years ago I moved over from a PC to a Mac and all my music (which I had saved in my software's native format) was gone* - So I started again using GarageBand and Logic Express. I wanted a proper connection between my guitar and my Mac so, on searching Amazon, I came across the Fast Track 2 USB Audio Interface with dual input and mic preamp + Pro Tools Software - Record Guitar and Vocals on Your Computer advert which combines M-Audio's "Fast Track" audio/instrument interface (in other words you plug a guitar/mic in the front and, via a USB cable, hear it through your PC/Mac) and Avid's "Pro Tools SE" music recording software. For a change, the reviewers were not solely PC users so I could read other's evaluations and know that they referred to my own system at home. As the reviews were generally positive, I asked if Father Christmas would bring me one as I'd been a "good boy" (lol). He did (care of my sister-in-law), and can say that the unit is definitely worth 5 stars and the software 3 (overall 4 stars). The unit works (with very little effort, I may add) equally well with it's native software, GarageBand and Logic Express. I have found little or no distortion (just don't set the recording levels too high) and there is definitely no delay between playing the note and hearing it, so it's easy to keep time with your backing tracks. (My Mac's a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM) The included software has no major faults other than the fact that is is a cut down version which severely limits the number of tracks you can run at any time, however, for a first timer, it's good enough AND the unit works so well and easily with other software including the Mac's built-in GarageBand, that I don't consider this a major draw-back. (If you have any problems getting it to work with your software, just "Google" "M-Audio Fast Track" with your software's name, and there's a wealth of help available to you). Can I recommend it? - definitely yes p.s. :- 1. Thanks to all you other reviewers (especially the Mac users) who make the effort to help potential buyers with your personal accounts of products available through Amazon. Like with this item, I find the reviews highly valuable when choosing my product. 2. Via the internet, I found a program called "Crossover" - it's a free program which allows you to run (some, not all) PC software on a Mac as a Mac application. This enabled me to run my old music software and start converting my 2,500+ backing tracks to Midi format to import into GarageBand/Logic Express and to re-use with my new "Fast Track" unit

This recording studio box from avid is exceptional, so tiny and portable yet can do a lot of cool things. You can plug your mic into it, a headphone slot is available and theres a guitar slot ( which I haven't tried as yet). You can monitor the sounds of each one via the box and use it as an interface to change the volume levels. Pretty nifty small recording studio.