Pod Farm 2.0 and Novation Nio 2|4 Sound Card driver problems

Cut a long story short, I had problems with Pod Farm once I'd started using the Novation Nio 2|4 sound card (instead of the Line 6 UX1 I'd had previously).


The reason for the change? The UX1 is unable to provide monitoring for another audio channel because it only has one set of stereo inputs. The Nio has two sets of stereo inputs (1-2 and 3-4), so you can use the 3-4 channels for cueing up audio from a source other than what's currently playing through the main monitors. Recently Line 6 had allowed its users to operate Pod Farm without requiring the UX1 plugged in - before that, the UX1 was used as a dongle, which used to annoy me no end. Anyway, I though that once I'd configured Pod Farm to run without the UX1, my problems would be solved. Wrong. No matter what I did, I could not get Pod Farm (the standalone version, although the VST plugin had the exact same problem...) to accept the Novation ASIO driver.

After lots of hair-pulling and to-and-fro with both Novation and Line 6 support, I finally discovered that providing I configured the Nio drivers to run in 44.1k, 24 bit mode rather than 48k 24 bit, Pod Farm would accept the driver and retain the settings. A further revelation was that Windows 7 has its own setting for the ASIO driver as well, and setting Windows to 44.1k and 24 bit solved the last issue - where only one application would run sound at a time.

Hope that helps someone with a similar problem.