After getting my Saffire Pro 40 Working without the sync problem in Windows 10 (20H2 v2) I was getting awful performance.

Here is a driver hack to get the Pro 40 working just as well as in Win 7:

First of all, get use the Legacy Firewire drivers.

The trick is to use Saffire MixControl 3.7, but with the file 'Pro40Firmware.bin' from MixControl 3.4.

You must then DISABLE the Pro40's playback and recording devices in 'Sound' under the Control Panel. ASIO access to your interface works fine & dandy.

I discovered this hack when I was experimening with the old 3.4 driver and found it worked just as good as when I was on Windows 7, but it was super cranky. I figured something was up.

So I copied the firmware (Pro40Firmware.bin) from the 3.4 version of mixcontrol to the 3.7 version I had installed and - boom. It goes and its just like I'm on windows 7.

I have ~1.0/1.6ms in Reaper and its solid as a brick.

For me, when I want to use youtube etc - I have my motherboard's audio interface going into an input on my focusrite. I also route the Mic to my onboard's 'line-in' jack, which lets me use discord etc. Windows in its daily life never ever sees the pro40. It uses the on-board.

some people don't want to buy new gear because of a nerd at redmond changing software APIs. a quick google will show you.

there's posts all over this forum with people fighting all interfaces, including scarletts - usually because they're USB 2.0. i don't feel like purchasing a new rednet (ethernet +coreaudio) based device just to get the same latency as i can get now without buying anything.

i picked this interface over others cos its firewire, so i can bypass half the OS stacks. its low latency & has clear preamps with with a million I/O.

getting reasonable latency in any windows with any audio device is nearly always a battle. the OS is a mess & its noone's fault. so I hope this information will be gold to somebody.

firewire devices by nature have direct access to physical memory, like a PCIe device. if you go old school you can get that direct access. USB is like 4 houses down the street before you're onto the same bus as the CPU

You are awesome. Thank you for posting this. Hoping this works for me. I had the clicky pop lights flashing thing going on after the last windows update. I thought I knew all the tricks to get the saffire back to running, but this one kicked my tail. I had to undo the updates, and until I find a solution, be forced to just leave updates off indefinitely. Been really sweating having to go through another system and interface build $$$. If this works for me, I'll be able to use my laptop with firwire to pick up a few more saffire super cheap and start doing more mobile stuff. I had been using a pair of Adat xt20's for that, but one of my machines took a dive last week. Cheaper to buy an interface then it is to fix an adat these days. I can literally buy 2 more pro 40's for what it will run me to service the adat machine. So hopefully this works and I'll be back in business. Thank you so much for your time to post this.

Hello pepelevamp: I'm having a similar issue with my Saffire Pro24 - Win 10 20H2 Build 19042 won't run the MixControl 3.7 installer, and I am a total nerd when it comes to hacking a file... have no idea how to do it. Can you 'bundle' up an executable for my Pro24 that Win 10 will accept and email it to me, or post it here? Is that even possible, or am I stuck with having to purchase a new USB-C interface? I like my Firewire Pro24 because it supports my external MIDI devices perfectly.

Thank you so very much for this!! I was about ready to toss my Saffire Pro 40 at the neighbors house before I found this post. Now I'm back in business!!

hey thats brilliant mate! i'm still using my pro 40 as well.

Hello there teabag.

Yeah mate sure I can help you out. Sorry it took so long to reply. I didn't see the notifications. I haven't been here since it was gearslutz.

There's kinda three stages to this mess. The first stage is getting the old legacy firewire driver to work in windows 10. Thats a whole thing.

The next stage is this hack with the MixControl software from focusrite.

The last stage is just seeing your onboard motherboard to be line in & line out to ya focusrite.

What have you done so far? I Can show you how to get together a bastard version of MixControl if you send me a PM. I can't distribute it online because Focusrite's lawyers will punch me in the stomach.

@ pepelevamp - kudos for this update. I had been using my Pro 40 as additional inputs for my ProjectMix IO, but I'm consolidating and freeing up space, and while everything looked like it was going to be fine, I went to play something back in 96khz and it was super choppy. Some Googling brought me to this thread, and with a little trial and error, I got it working.

Here's some super basic step-by-step details:

1) Install Mixcontrol 3.4
1a) In Control Panel -> Sound, disable Saffire Pro 40 (don't use it for your system audio)
2) Browse to the folder where it was installed (e.g. C:\Program Files\Focusrite\Saffire MixControl)
3) Rename Pro40Firmware.bin to anything else. For example, rename it to Pro40Firmware.bin.3.4
4) Uninstall MixControl - this will remove all the files except the one you renamed. This will require a restart - might as well.
5) Install MixControl 3.7 into the same folder as last time
6) Browse to the folder where it was installed
7) Rename Pro40Firmware.bin to Pro40Firmware.bin.3.7
8) Rename Pro40Firmware.bin.3.4 to Pro40Firmware.bin
9) Optionally, restart your computer

Note: At this point, MixControl wasn't connecting to my device. Got a little weirded out at first, but here's how I got that under control:

10) Open Device Manager
11) Under "Sound, Video, and Game Controllers" (or something sound related), you should see an icon indicating that the Saffire driver is missing.
12) Tell it to find a new driver, and that you'll browse to the correct folder
13) Paste in the folder where MixControl was installed - it should correct the driver installation
14) Fire up MixControl - you should now see the familiar mixer interface, and your Firewire light should be lit.

I did still see some weirdness on my first go around - the sample rate kept jumping around, the Firewire light on the device was blinking. In MixControl, I clicked File -> Restore Factory Defaults, and that fixed that. I also clicked "Save to Hardware" but I'm not real sure that's relevant.

Anyway, I almost never listen in 96khz, but it was a good indicator that the buffering wasn't working like it should have been. Thanks for figuring this one out, I would have been bummed out and probably wouldn't have chased down the old driver like you did, since this hardware is new to me.

good on ya man! yeah its a pretty heavy unit. but all that sweet IO. i ****en hate windows just changing & making things not work. s'bull**** aye.

if you want to know whats screwing stuff up - you can use process explorer. right click the columns and enable 'cswitch delta'. its shows you the context-switches which interrupt your CPU & cause the clicks. you can sort by the worst offenders. run it as administrator. its my go-too tool.

often its these bloat**** web apps like spotify, slack, etc. they always wake up the CPU.

also anything WIFI or networking. windows gives networking higher priority than audio because its an asshole.

if you want to know whats screwing stuff up - you can use process explorer. right click the columns and enable 'cswitch delta'. its shows you the context-switches which interrupt your CPU & cause the clicks. you can sort by the worst offenders. run it as administrator. its my go-too tool.[/quote]

I remember passing DOS 5 around to friends at school on 3.5" floppies, and I've largely done a pretty good job of keeping up, while also retaining a lot of that solid under-the-hood understanding (Don't sleep on Event Viewer!) I can go pretty deep, but these days I don't have the patience. Rather than chase down why it clicks when using the 3.7 drivers, I'm happy to use the 3.4 drivers.

I'm one of about a dozen people left in the US who's never used Spotify

I live in Philadelphia, and the density around here means wifi tends to be pretty awful anyway, which is why I wired the house with CAT6 :D

oh man event viewer! good thinking. personally i'm going to be abandoning spotify because the audio quality is garbage.

its like yeah sure they're probably streaming uncompressed sound to me - but the source material has gone through DFT processing somehow & is all quantized & yuck.

Do you know of anyone who has tried this with a Liquid Pro 56? I have a Pro 40 as well slaved to the 56 & failed to research potential connectivity problems & was also unaware Focusrite was discontinuing firewire/ Saffire support. I just had my rig rebuilt as well & have the 21H1 build of Win 10. I've also recently purchased a Syba 2 port 1394 firewire card with a Texas Instrument chipset thinking this may have caused the problem as well. I haven't installed it yet & I'm wondering if I should give it a go(?) If anyone has any thoughts it would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!

Liquid Saffire 56 and Pro 40 running on win10 with no problems.

Thanks! How did you get that to work???

Using the Siffire MixControl 3.8b1.
Lagacy 1394 OHCI drivers.

Thanks...I'll try this!

Im trying to make a new installer with some fixes...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_s4SWgcDqY&t

Hello Very good you see the mod driver. could you send me some link to download and pobarlo? Thank you so much.

MAJOR LIFESAVER!! ALL PRAISE TO @ pepelevamp !

I have a simplified and revised version of this that is working great for me on the latest 21H2 feature set for Windows 10.

So.... do this:

"The trick is to use Saffire MixControl 3.7, but with the file 'Pro40Firmware.bin' from MixControl 3.4."

1. Install version 3.4. and copy the Pro40firmware.bin to your desktop (or wherever)

2. remove 3.4, reboot, then install 3.7. Replace Pro40firmware.bin with the one you saved from 3.4
Reboot.

3. Rock the f- out.

If you are actually hearing the clicks -- move your WIFI router at least 5 meters away from your monitors.

You're welcome Here's hoping this trick still survives Windows 11. There be a storm coming

Did it? I'm not getting it to work. I might have done something wrong though.

Any luck? (I want to find some cheap ADAT I/O that works standalone, and a Saffire Pro 40 would do, but I'd also like to be able to admin it as well.). Cheers

I did not get it to work on Win 11, so for now I've just downgraded to Win 10

Thanks for posting back. I'm still on Win10 and am now hunting down a clean Pro40 or Liquid56 now. Going to send it into my Digiface.

Here in Berlin you can find em for less than 100eur pretty regularly

Leider wohne ich nicht mehr in Berlin.

Doch kein Problem, eBay hat ein paar...

- Gruesse aus England

will it work!?!?

I have 2 in dual mode on my old desktop running win 7... will NEVER update windows.

now...

I got a laptop recently, I need a portable flight-cased recording rack...

win 10 22H2, thunderbolt 3 ports (*)...


is it possible?!?!?

or, can I downgrade win 10!?!?!?


(*) I think I need 2 adapters


Fabio

Hi, to whoever needs help with pops and clicks with the Saffire pro 40, thanks to this post by @ pepelevamp , I managed to find another similar solution.

I was running Mix control 3.8b1 and i was getting pops and clicks in ableton and even on youtube etc.

I tried the mix control 3.7 install with using the pro 40 bin from 3.4 but it didnt work for me, kept getting an error saying "please download the latest mix control"
what worked for me was to install version 3.8b1 and use the Pro40Firmware.bin from the 3.4 version.
Basically the same solution but instead of using mix control 3.7, I used the 3.8b1.
this solved the issue for me. someone on this thread posted a download link for 3.8b1
Enjoy!
God Bless! Jesus is King

Hi, to whoever needs help with pops and clicks with the Saffire Pro 40, thanks to this post by @ pepelevamp , I managed to find another similar solution.

I was running Mix control 3.8b1 and i was getting pops and clicks in ableton and even on youtube etc.

I tried the mix control 3.7 install with using the Pro 40 bin from 3.4 but it didnt work for me, kept getting an error saying "please download the latest mix control"
what worked for me was to install version 3.8b1 and use the Pro40Firmware.bin from the 3.4 version.
Basically the same solution but instead of using mix control 3.7, I used the 3.8b1.
this solved the issue for me. someone on this thread posted a download link for 3.8b1
Enjoy!
God Bless! Jesus is King