Audition 1.5 with M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in Win 7 -- Is it possible?

Before I beat my head against the wall trying to get it to work, does anyone know if this is do-able? I have Audition 1.5 installed on my Dell Win 7 64-bit laptop, and it works. I can load sessions and files created on my XP desktop machine and continue to mix, etc.

Just to see if I could get it going, hoping to do multitrack recording from my laptop, I bought the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8x8, installed it using drivers for Win 7 64-bit, for my laptop. But Audition 1.5 only sees the device itself, not the 8 channels for assigning in multitrack. Am I hoping for too much? Hoping Audition is going to work in Win 7 with an interface using Win 7 drivers? Is there something in the Win 7 Control Panel's Audio settings I need to tweak to help make it happen?

On my XP machine, an M-Audio install of my Delta 1010 is doing just fine with Audition, which has no problem seeing all channels available. If trying this on my laptop is a dead-end, then I'll probably look at upgrading to Audition 3. I think I can still get a $99 upgrade, which is going to be the cheapest solution for me.

But I'd prefer staying in Audition 1.5, if possible.

Chances are that this is a driver-related issue. Audition 1.5 doesn't use ASIO, and if the WDM driver for your M-audio only handles one stereo pair (which a lot do) then you won't see the rest of the channels. And that's something that ASIO4ALL won't get you out of, I'm afraid - problem is the wrong way around!

The thing to do is to try the demo of Reaper or the freebe Wavosaur, both of which can be set to use either asio or wdm drivers. If the asio drivers make it work, then Audition 3 upgrade should be a go-er. I think Reaper is safer.

I have never got a straight answer from any manufacturer, but I think the question hinges on whether the non-asio part of the drivers are specially written by the manufacturer or just invoke the basic Microsoft WDM driver.

I wouldn't mind another multitrack tool, but I'm wondering if trying to learn Reaper is more of a headache than going with an Audition upgrade. I'll try the Reaper demo and see about it. With the M-Audio Fast Track I got Ableton Live 8, but it will only allow 4 tracks. I could use that in a pinch for what I usually do, but 8 would be much better. Just tinkering with the Ableton interface made me cringe a bit.

I'll see if Reaper will convince me not to go with Audition 3 for my laptop. But I'll stick with Audition 1.5 on my XP desktop.

After a couple weeks or so of both Audition 1.5 and Reaper on my Dell Win 7 x64 laptop running with the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8x8 USB audio interface, it looks like I've come to a probable working scenario. For multitrack recording I'll use Reaper, since it sees all 8 of Ultra's channels. Nothing fancy, just learn to use punch-ins and do multiple takes -- just to get the music laid down. Reaper's handling of takes is a bit more tidy and flexible than Audition anyway.

Then I'll use Reaper's feature for preparing session files for other DAWs, in my case Audition, of padding all tracks at the beginning, no matter where along the timeline they were recorded, so that loading the wav files into Audition only requires that each track be placed at 0:00. No need to know where the original clips began.

So it'll be Reaper to cut the tracks, Audition to mix. And that I can do all on my laptop -- both using the Fast Track Ultra as my audio interface. The Dell Win 7 system handles the USB load just fine. So far, Reaper's default latency numbers work well. And if I *wanted* to use Audition for recording just myself, or only a single artist, in layering.multitracks one or two at a time, I could do that since Audition does see 2 tracks from Fast Track. But I will be using Audition for mixing since I have a boatload of plugins that I already know.

But I will be using Audition for mixing since I have a boatload of plugins that I already know.

Chances are, Reaper can use those same plug-ins too unless you are talking about Audition's built in effects. If you really want to move between Reaper and Audition then take a look at Runaway's AATranslator program which will save you having to render the separate tracks in Reaper.

James.

Chances are, Reaper can use those same plug-ins too unless you are talking about Audition's built in effects. If you really want to move between Reaper and Audition then take a look at Runaway's AATranslator program which will save you having to render the separate tracks in Reaper.

That could save some disk space in the long run -- keeping small clips from being padded with silence. Never thought I'd need AATranslator, but I can see it on the horizon now.