Motu Ultralite MkIII Squeal - Resolved

[demetrio]

I have been experiencing problems in the last few days with squeal and freezes in Windows 7 64 bit. Some freezes were sounds freezes which stoped the sounds altogether others were system freezes (not even a blue screen). I was able to reproduce the squeal and freeze at any point by expanding and contracting the window of my development platform Visual Studio 2010. It would also happen at other points randomly like when i opened window explorer and checked for email but these occurrences were intermittent.

I tried rolling back from the latest driver 4.0.4.3553 to an earlier one 4.0.4.2546 thinking that the recent upgrade was the problem. The upgrade was performed by uninstalling the old version, restarting without the motu plugged in. Installing the older driver and then turing on the motu. This did not work. I also did the factory reset on the Motu. This did not work either.

The only thing that happened in the last few days was removing two ram sticks from my pc which dropped it from 8GB to 4GB. After trying almost everything and as a last resort I tried placing the extra memory back. To my surprise the squeals went away. I was not able to reproduce it after the additional memory was added. If you are experiencing this issue you might want to try what I did and add extra ram to see if that resolves your issue. I must admit though, 8GB (or 6GB) requirement of RAM is excessive and Motu should look at making a driver that is less resource hungry.

Note, I tried this with both virtual memory turned off and on to correct the squeal under 4GB memory. With 4GB RAM I had about 1GB free after booting and staring my development platform.

I hope this helps another frustrated motu user…
Demetrio

[demetrio]

As a followup, I have had instaces of squeal again as well as a incident of squeal then no sound at all. This sometimes happens when hovering over an icon on the start menu. Overall it doesn't happen very often but is still not acceptible. I'm not sure why anyone would buy the ultralite for windows. This is my third return and still has problems.

[demetrio]

This seems to start happening with the free ram decreasing to around 2gb. Above free 3GB ram, no squeal or freezes detected.

[Mourning6]

I use a Motu Utralite Mk3 on a Win7 x64 setup and was having the same issue.

I found the solution for my setup on a random Ableton forum (I was looking everywhere and this was the only thing that went beyond reinstalling the drivers). Turns out my issue was that the cores of my quad core processor were "parking" which means turning off if they weren't being used. It was enough of a disruption that it would throw off the connection with the ultralite. This is an issue for Windows setups and by default windows has cores park pretty quickly to conserve power. I had my computer in high performance at all times with 100% usage on the processor but core parking isn't shown in the power settings by default (it's a separate function from processor usage). I used this freeware to turn off core parking and I haven't had the issue in the 48 hours since: https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/

I used to have this issue 3 times per hour...

Hope that solves it for you or whoever makes it to this thread