I recently had a Tascam US-144, USB audio and midi interface, gifted to me by my awesome sister and her boyfriend - thanks guys. However, I’ve had an absolute nightmare getting the thing to work so just wanted to share my experiences with the world.

Essentially, I wanted a device that I could hook up to my laptop and it provide professional quality mic and jack inputs alond with a midi interface, which is a remit the US144 fills exactly - it’s powered over USB, has two XLR inputs, two 1/4in jacks inputs, a line out, and midi in/out. The problem is, the US144 is deprecated and seemingly no longer supported by Tascam and as such the company hasn’t developed Windows 7 64-bit drivers for it.

That’s pretty much the long and short of it. My laptop was running Windows7 64-bit thus it didn’t work. I’ve now put a 32-bit version on and it works fine. Now some people have had success getting this device working in 64-bit Windows 7 but I think the general rule of thumb is that it doesn’t.

So, to summarise. If like me you’re scratching your head as to why your US-144 won’t work on Windows 7 64-bit then don’t hold out much hope. Either install a compatible version of Windows or get the US-144 MKII, which may work, or the Roland (Edirol/Cakewalk) UA-25, which is still being properly supported by its manufacturer (there are other alternatives as well but these are the ones I know).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Music, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.