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My notebook only has HDMI, USB 2 and USB 3 ports. I would like to connect it to a FireWire audio interface. I did some research and found out I can't use a simple adapter.

The interface is M-Audio Pro Fire 2626.

Is there any way of making this work? Maybe using a smaller, expandable, USB interface?

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You don't have an ethernet port at all? There's theoretically firewire solutions over ethernet.

My only suggestion would be to get another small computer to use for recording sessions and have permanently with the interface. Also interfaces like that respond poorly to being unplugged and replugged into a notebook repeatedly over time.

In other words, no I don't believe this is possible in the current paramaters.

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  • I do have an ethernet port. Is it possible to run the interface with that and an adapter?
    – Costagero
    Mar 13, 2015 at 20:15
  • Sorry I was recalling that there was an interest in making those standards adaptable but nothing ever came of it according to my searches. I think because firewire and ethernet both got subsumed to thunderbolt in newer macs no one bothered to make the necessary innovations on the OS level to adapt ethernet into firewire. Mar 13, 2015 at 20:22
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USB is half-duplex, Firewire is full-duplex. That makes adapters quite non-trivial and make the latency behavior for soundcard use, particularly full-duplex, not a good fit. Laptops tend to have expresscard slots (which offer a PCI-X connection for which Firewire adapters are available) or Thunderbolt connectors (again, for which Firewire adapters are available). Pure USB won't work. That includes USB-to-Expresscard adapters which only provide the USB connection of an Expresscard slot, not the PCI-X connection.

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You would be able to use a firewire 400 converter to an USB 2. I am not sure if they make a firewire 400 to an USB3.

What is the firewire for? Inputs or outs?

P.S. - I found my converter at an Apple store just last month.

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