Presonus Firepod Channel Indicators Gone

[hedera]

I've been using Audacity 1.3.3 on a Vista laptop to record chorus rehearsals for podcasting - we have 2 mics and a PreSonus FirePod 1394 (8 ports). Under 1.3.3, on the Preferences menu, I have 2 dropdowns for playback and record, and with the FirePod connected, each line that says "FirePod" indicates the channel(s) that it's associated with. This is important because we've been using channels 3 and 4 for the mics; we also have a pair of headphones that we connect to the FirePod to check the recording by listening to "playback" on the headphones. Note that this has been working well for about 5 months.

I recently upgraded to Audacity 1.3.4, and when I opened up the FirePod for last night's rehearsals, I was appalled to find that all the Preferences menu items basically just said "FirePod in" and "FirePod out." No channel indicators at all. I actually uninstalled 1.3.4 and reinstalled 1.3.3 - but the channels still weren't labeled. I managed to get the recording going using channels 1 and 2, but it wasn't fun, and I never did get the headphone jack to pick up the playback, so the recording is too soft because I couldn't validate the levels.

I think this is because I installed 1.3.4 without bothering to connect the FirePod to the laptop - can someone confirm this? If so it's easy enough to fix; but if not I'm going to have to plug everything in and spend a couple of hours trying to figure out which Preferences line associates with which channels on the FirePod. What bothers me about this theory is that I re-installed 1.3.3 with the FirePod plugged in, and I still have no channel indicators. Help??

[Document02]

I have been experiencing the same kind of issues with a firebox. IMO it comes from a lousy Presonus driver integration in Vista. Similar problems have been pointed out on a regular basis on presonus forums, (some of the threads have been deleted by presonus support techs, and no solution is being brought up.)

A post was made three months ago mentioning alpha drivers being tested inside Presonus, but nothing else hase leaked since.
Other problems reported were
- audio starts to be chirpy after some random length of use with windows apps (media players, games...)
- randoms desync of the sound...

The only way I found to get everythong working was to reinstall completely the presonu drivers, including any hardware updates, but sometimes, without reasons visible to the user, the names will drop out again.

[hedera]

Thanks for the insight, Document02; I'd been thinking about doing that on general principles and you've confirmed that's the next step. The bizarre thing is that it worked fine for about 4 months. Oh, well.