Geek Speak

Some time ago I purchased an M-Audio Transit USB sound card, and it’s actually pretty cool but it has caused me some angst. At first I was using it solely under Mac OS X 10.4, and without incident, but then I was forced to buy a regular laptop and the love ended there, somewhat.

I run both Windows Vista Business and Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop, Ubuntu for day-to-day and Vista for games and audio production (Ableton Live). I thought as though Vista has been around for a while, like my Tranist, it should be a good fit, unfortunately I was wrong. Firstly, a little magic is required when installing the Transit Vista driver and making it function. Secondly, the Vista driver for Transit itself is still just the first release beta and has not been updated since it’s release in July 2007. As a result there are some problems with it and led me to question whether or not Transit Vista driver is abandonware. Mercifully an M-Audio support technician was at least able to confirm that Vista users have not yet been completely ignored by M-Audio, but there are no guarantees that we’ll see something more substantial before Windows 7 arrives.

I also bit the bullet and had a go at getting my Transit USB to work under Ubuntu 8.10. The initial instructions I read just about put the fear of God in me, but thankfully it’s not that miserable for Ubuntu users. One can easily install the Linux Transit drivers by using Synaptic is selecting the “madfu” package. This beats the pants off compiling it yourself and is almost easier than the Vista approach - except for one small hitch: there’s a bug. Oh why, why? Once again, as with the Vista driver, it’s to do with the driver being out of touch with a newer release of the Operating System. I was able to fix it with some Googling and just a few small tweaks. Now my Transit driver loads immediately on connection under Ubuntu, unless I plug it into a USB port different to the previous (yes, this steams from the bug) but I have not the inclination to go further with it at this time. Nor is there any control panel available under Linux and this the fault of M-Audio as they refuse to even simply devulge device specifications, let alone write a driver themselves. Come guys, use the power of the Open Source community to your advantage!

My next adventure will probably be to see how well the Transit and Ableton Live run on a virtualized instance of Windows XP in VirtualBox under Ubuntu. This could hopefully be a nice compromise. On the bright side, at least I can use it, somewhat, under any OS I like and it is a wonderful little sound card.