M-Audio Firewire Solo

The M-Audio Mac utility auto-upgrades its firmware when the device is connected. I unplugged without realizing this was happening, but I seem to have gotten lucky or their update process is quite resilient. Used powerbook running 10.4.11. M-audio's FireWire OSX 1.8.2 version. Worked on my old powerbook, but not on the Mini running Catalina. Probably works up to Lion.

Had a lot of trouble getting an XP host to recognize it. Final solution was to run a qemu VM on my laptop. With Apple's Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter, and the Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter I was able to pass through the PCIe Firewire (FW643) device to the VM. I think the trouble may have been my other XP setups used external power. With this VM setup I was able to power the Solo from the firewire bus. I also had to use a special utility in the C:\Program Files\M-Audio\Firewire\FWDeviceEnabler folder to get it working. It seems to load a dummy device in Windows and do some voodoo to initialize the device and load firmware if necessary. Just follow the prompt instructions.

Linux seems to be a separate can of worms. Even after getting the recommended 5058 firmware installed via the messy XP setup I can't get the card to start in Linux. What does work is running the XP VM and having the card functional. Then killing that VM drops the firewire card and Solo back to the host. Then the card is mostly functional in Linux. Sound is quite nice, but trying to record sound and play sound at the same time had severe issues.

I think I'll hold onto the card as a nice device for old machines, but it doesn't seem workable on Linux unless I missed a trick. According to https://tomoyo.osdn.jp/cgi-bin/lxr/source/sound/firewire/bebob/bebob_maudio.c after the 5058 firmware is loaded it stays resident on the flash memory. The BeBoB driver should be able to send a cue to load the firmware. This doesn't seem to be happening for me though.