Additionally, for troubleshooting, you can check:
- event logs
- crash logs with applications such as BlueScreenView or WhoCrashed.
For the most part nobody’s done much of anything with Firewire on Windows for more than a decade, so pretty much any card you get is going to be an ancient card using an ancient chipset.
In addition to that challenge, Windows 10 more or less forced a driver system on us where Windows will “phone home” to find the right drivers for a device that’s installed in a Windows 10 system. Usually this works great, but sometimes it’s horrible. A case in point where it is horrible is with firewire drivers.
There are two major firewire chipset providers: Texas Instruments and VIA. Within both of those you have multiple generations and multiple categories of firewire chips. Certain firewire devices are known not to play well with certain chipsets. I believe firewire audio in general, and RME specifically, has been reported to have problems with the TI X102200A chipset. With that case aside, many people said they had better luck with the TI chipsets than VIA chipsets.
Back to windows driver issues - some chipsets simply don’t work well with the drivers Windows 10 automatically downloads and installs. And by “don’t work well” I mean the unpredictable “stopped working” and “blue screen” type errors. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if your card just doesn’t like the drivers Windows installed.
If you know the specific card you have you may still be able to get the old “legacy” drivers that were made for windows 8 or windows 7 or whatever the current windows was when the card was new.
If you do manage to identify the card and locate the drivers, there’s a process to go through to force windows 10 to use the “legacy” driver that actually work and stop using the Windows driver that it thinks is the right one.
Last time I went through all this was 2018 and it was a few hours of Google searching to find 10 year old conversations on scattered forums, then rolling the dice on what I thought was my best bet. It works for me, but it’s not made anymore, so I can’t exactly recommend it.
Probably the most useful advice I could give is:
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look at the card that’s in your system now. Chances are the card isn’t the problem. It’s more likely the driver. Look at the main chip on the card and it will say either VIA in big letters, or it’ll have a picture of Texas on it. Look at the numbers on it, Google for it, and see if people say it needs “legacy drivers.” If you don’t know what you’re looking at, take a picture of it and post it here.
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if you end up buying a new card, get a firewire 1394a card. You don’t benefit from the extra speed of 1394b unless you plan on daisy chaining a few audio interfaces together. A lot of cards have both. (1394a is firewire 400, 1394b is firewire 800). More people seemed to report more problems using 800 than 400 with Windows.
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make sure any card you’re looking at will actually fit in an available slot on your PC. Basically, you have either the small PCIe slots, or the older and longer PCI slots. Chances are you want a PCIe card, with the small slot. Unless you’re on a 10 year old PC, then you probably have the long slots.
The difference is obvious when you look at the part or the card that inserts into the slot on your motherboard.
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We will add a new feature request to fix Gig Performer so that it stays running when the power goes off.
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For my own, everything is set to “do nothing”: this includes the power on/off and standby buttons, closing the cover, switching off the power supply,…
As a professional slacker I believe in the virtues of the do-nothing-function 
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Couldn’t agree more.
That is good to know, it is definitely getting set to “Do Nothing” since I don’t use it anyway. On my HP there is about 1/4" between the power button and the ESC key. Small enough that my fat finger can easily hit both at once!
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LOL… you know that feeling when everyone looks at you and says “Are you ready?” and your like “ughhh, I have a problem”
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Me, shouting to the other band musicians:“You need to play a song without keyboards, NOW!”
Happened once in a while with my former live host, Brainspawn Forte on a Win7 laptop. Not with GP.
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In my band, I shout the same thing out but just because I need to go to the bathroom😂
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Yeah, if you wait for a GP crash to go to the bathroom, things can go wrong before 
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Mainstage is unstable in my experience. GigPerformer never crashed. Mainstage has a huge CPU problem and GigPerformer does not have high CPU uage. This is a major difference. I cannot use Mainstage as it crashes even with the most powerful Macbook Pros. I never faced a crash with GigPerformer.
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I had to abandon all Firewire devices with Windows 10 version 1903. It broke Firewire performance and caused constant dropouts.
I’ve never had GP cause a BSOD. I have had a crash due to a plugin that did not like patch change messages. I resolved that by simply creating different rackspaces and variants instead of using a widget to send patch change messages.
Use LatencyMon to determine if the computer is optimized for audio.
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Has anyone experienced BSODs and identified the cause to be Iconnectivity’s MioXL?
Hello everybody!
I am pretty new in using Gig Performer and really love it. I am a guitarist and use it mainly with S-Gear as amp setup, and with MidiGuitar2 as guitar synth.
I had some issues to solve, maybe this helps other folks just starting with GP.
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I had crashes virtually every time I edited something in the “options”. I first also had a terrible big latency - I use Scarlett Solo 3r gen as interface.
Mistake: I had set the audio input on “Windows Audio” because I had thought that ASIO is always equals ASIO4all, which I had used for the setup of my mfx.
Solution: Set audio to ASIO and then to Facusrite… -
I often had crashes when starting GP. I have to say, that I play just on sessions and don’t use songs, but just rackspaces for each sound I want to use. And as mentioned above I use Sgear and MidiGuitar2 as main vsts.
Solution: Setting MidiGuitar on “delayed loading”. -
I got the blue screen when I disconnected the Scarlett while running GP.
Solution: Hands off the USB-Plug!
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Sometimes - I think at moments of rather high gain - my headphones plugged in the Scarlett get muted. I am not sure about the main output of the interface.
No solution yet found. I guess I will lower the gain settings in the rackspaces. I use them pretty much up to zero db in order to use the full range of the digital “solution” (I come from the field of photography where one has to be aware of the “depth of solution” one uses when taking a picture).
For issue #4 I’d be glad to get some advice in case anybody has had the same experience or just an idea, what could be the reason for the switch-off of the headphone output at the Scarlett.
Greetings from Germany
Hans Gruber (yes, I didn’t fall off the nakatomi tower! 
)
GP3 or GP4?
GP3. Indeed!
@Real_Hans_Gruber welcome to our forums!
You have to use ASIO drivers on Windows or the latency will simply not be adequate. The BSOD issue when plugin something in or out of your computer is only related to your drivers as GP cannot crash your computer - a driver can. Please make sure you have the latest drivers for your interface and your computer is up to date.
The issue #4 seems to be related to your interface and not to GP. Maybe someone i the forums will be able to help you with this.
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