Upgrading the Presonus Firepod to an FP10

Presonus isn’t going to fix it for free. Proceed at your own risk.

Presonus FP10

As it turns out the Presonus Firepod and FP-10 are exactly the same under the hood. A copyright dispute with Apple resulted in Presonus rebranding the Firepod into the “FP-10″. They also took the opportunity to change the firmware and add a few new features. Besides needing the FP-10 firmware to use the most recent drivers, it also enables a standalone mode in which all eight preamps are capable of outputing directly to their associated line out without needing to be sync’d to a PC in order to route them through a DAW. This functionality is really useful if you have a tape machine without built in preamplifiers.

The Presonus site is quick to point out that any Firepod can be upgraded to this revision, but curiously the necessary firmware package is missing from the Firepod page. Upon doing some research, I discovered that the Presonus folks have decided not to post the necessary driver and firmware packages on their site because a bug with the updater will brick your interface if you run it on any operating system besides Windows XP. At one point they sent me an OSX binary, but it was corrupted, so for now this is a PC only process. In order to upgrade the Firepod to an FP-10 you will need to install the 2.46 driver and then the Firepod_to_FP10 utility.

Files

Step 1: FirePod_Installer_246.zip
Step 2: PC_FirePod_to_FP10.rar