First of all , I have a Dell PC GX260, 3,0 ghz and 1 gig of ram. My original soundcard was a Creative Labs Audigy 2 platinum with an ASIO interface. I am running Windows XP SP2. I originally bought the Motu Symphonic Instrument software from a music store, version 1.0.
1. When I first loaded it everything worked except that it was severely out of tune. After spending some time troubleshooting it was discovered that this was because the Audigy card's ASIO interface was only capable of operating at 48k sampling rate, instead of the 44k that the Motu software wanted to use. My only choice was to detune every time I wanted to use it (which is a pain).
2. Months later the versions 1.1 and 1.1.1 were released with a new standalone option. I loaded these thinking it would fix the detune problem, but both of these versions crashed from the very beginning. I have loaded both of these versions on several other PC's with various soundcards, memory, and with fresh operating system loads, to no avail. Long story short - neither one of these versions work for pc's (and still don't). I went back to the 1.0 version and everything is back the way it was.
3. It should be noted at this point that MSI doesn't really work with any low end sound cards, like the ones built into your pc. I have only been able to make things work with higher end cards with ASIO interfaces. That being said, I purchased one of the newer Creative Labs X-fi platinum cards last week (about $200 for the ones with the front face plate RCA and stereo connections) and installed this in place of the Audigy card. Both the Audigy and the X-fi are almost identical cards with one major exception - the X-fi has an ASIO interface that runs with 44k or 48k. Lo and behold with my new card set to 44k and version 1.0 MSI - life is good. Detune problem is gone.
4. There were two more problems I needed to solve. First there is no standalone for MSI 1.0, which is something I could really use. Since I'm not doing much sequencing and I just wanted to be able to play the samples on my keyboard I discovered an ingeniously designed new freeware package on the internet called "Cantabile" which can be downloaded from here:
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/Cantabile/
This software is bare-bones low overhead (only 493k ! ) and works great with MSI 1.0. Best of all it is free. Now I have a standalone version that works.
5. The second problem was that everything was fuzzy and distorted every once in awhile, but it was fuzzy and distorted for all of my other plugins as well. I believe I have found the solution to that as well in this driver upgrade for the X-fi card, which I am going to try tonight. The driver can be found here:
http://us.creative.com/support/download ... &x=34&y=10
One other thing to note is that there is a less expensive version of the X-Fi card that doesn't have the faceplate controls, but may still work with the MSI software.
Maybe this will help some of you users that are pulling your hair out. It may not solve every problem, but it solved mine (only 8 months later).
Good luck!
