Traveler? Crap!! (resolved... bad unit)

keyskat · Post by **keyskat** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:35 pm

Duh,I forgot to share.
I ordered a KeySpan FPCI-3N FireWire on Amazon for $30US. It claims to have the Texas Instruments Chipset.
I will let you know how it works out once I receive it and install it in the studio pc.
Hoping it will play nice with my pci-324 card.

eixb · Post by **eixb** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:37 pm

based on a long history of working with and troubleshooting firewire issues, i'd say pick up a TI-based firewire card first and foremost.

in addition to those manufacturers already mentioned in previous posts, avid & digidesign also recommend the TI chipset in the form of the pyro 1394. i'm sure many people know how picky avid hardware is...so if it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for the rest of us.

there's definitely a strong consensus about going with a TI chipset. i'd recommend the ads pyro 1394 pci card, it's never done me wrong on a windows machine.

alobonzo · Post by **alobonzo** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 5:46 am

Hi
I received the Traveler on Monday, everything seemed ok, and on Tuesday channel 1 started to make noise, even withouth anything connected. I'm waiting for a new unit.
Did anybody have the same problem?

eyeknow · Post by **eyeknow** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 2:31 am

when I got my traveler I noticed two things (this is pre macintel....)

a. It was very picky, and there is even a blurb somewhere that motu's drivers are incompatible with sp2.....which I think is ridiculous since you must have sp2 to run allot of software.......hosts.....etc.

b. That it sounded so much better than my previous pci soundcard I was excited that I was moving to mac.

On macs, it seems motu works best...........so far, 6 months......my drivers have never puked up.......

I feel the pain of all who have had to deal with fw issues on pc.

mke52 · Post by **mke52** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 8:41 am

Well I'm back again angry as ever. So I went out and got a texas chip firewire interface. Fine for two days then nothing!! any application that uses the soundcard freezes and there's no way to end the application with the task manager. You have to restart the PC.

I think this is fraud! there is no explicit warning on the Traveler box and even the documentation only slightly mentions that there could be some issues with the firewire interface.

alobonzo: welcome to the club! My first Traveler had no outputs a part from noise. I had it changed. That was only the begining of my problems...

alobonzo · Post by **alobonzo** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 9:45 am

I hope to get a working Traveler soon.
I sold my old 896 to get the Traveler, don't know if I were wrong.
Sorry hearing about the PC problems, once I bought a PC for music..... gave it to my brother and got a mac.
good luck

borjam · Post by **borjam** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 5:29 am

[quote="mke52"]
I think this is fraud! there is no explicit warning on the Traveler box and even the documentation only slightly mentions that there could be some issues with the firewire interface.
[quote]
Fraud? Come on...

Does your car include a warning that stupid drivers in other cars can kill you? Does it include a warning that you can die if you try to use it like a ship?

Blame incompetent hardware manufacturers who insist on violating standards. By the way, I guess MOTU could face legal action if they just said "Use TI chips because others might violate the Firewire standards".

In the world of peecees it should be vox-populi that all the hardware is not equal. I have been using embedded PCs for industrial applications for many years and I could tell all sorts of stories about poorly designed hardware.

mke52 · Post by **mke52** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:12 am

borjam wrote:
mke52 wrote: I think this is fraud! there is no explicit warning on the Traveler box and even the documentation only slightly mentions that there could be some issues with the firewire interface.
Fraud? Come on...

Does your car include a warning that stupid drivers in other cars can kill you? Does it include a warning that you can die if you try to use it like a ship?

Blame incompetent hardware manufacturers who insist on violating standards. By the way, I guess MOTU could face legal action if they just said "Use TI chips because others might violate the Firewire standards".

In the world of peecees it should be vox-populi that all the hardware is not equal. I have been using embedded PCs for industrial applications for many years and I could tell all sorts of stories about poorly designed hardware.

I would be in agreement with you if the problem had been resolved by changing the firewire card.
So how many cards do I have to buy before finding the right one "compatible" with my poor traveler?
This is Motu's formal reply to my third e mail.

"Thank you for your email.
Only Texas Instruments and Lucent are recommended. You can try a card with one of these chips."

Well it's not true. Texas chips are not necessarily compatible.

Now I'm sure there is a problem on my PC but what I cannot accept is that there is no support and I know that may have my same problem.

mke52 · Post by **mke52** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 2:45 am

If anyone is interested here is an update.
There is a windows patch for correcting a firewire problem on SP2. I loaded it and things do improve a bit although there are still clock issues and the audio sounds like an old LP with all the cracks and pops...
Any suggestions are highly apreciated.

kelldammit · Post by **kelldammit** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 7:04 pm

strangely enough, my traveler works fine on a macbook with winxp sp2?
though, the conventional wisdom is that sp2 is notorious for its broken firewire driver "patch". when i got my tascam 1884 a couple years ago, they actually included an xp sp2 firewire driver patch/replacement on the driver cd. so yes, just about everything requires sp2, except for firewire, which sp2 basically kills. couldn't tell you why mine seems to work okay, though?

insofar as the popping/clicking...that sounds suspiciously like buffer settings or driver work priority issues. dunno if work priority is an option with pc, but they'd be the first things i'd check.
the next step would be to make sure the card is not in a slot that shares an irq.
all of this is of course assuming you don't have any other devices on the same firewire bus/chain. if there are, remove them for the sake of experimentation/sanity. beyond that...i wish i could think of anything else to suggest...

it sucks that you're having such trouble. my traveler has really been a wonderful interface.

kell

mke52 · Post by **mke52** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 11:56 am

Thanks Kell, I did in fact check the iRQ's and did find that the USB/PCI card was sharing the same IRQ as the firewire card. However I uninstalled the driver and took the USB card out and I still had problems.
Today I re-formatted and loaded XP pro SP1 but even just with XP the card gives me the same problems.
With windows media player (the only sound application in XP) the program freezes after a few seconds of play.
I'm starting to think that even this second Traveler is defective...

Smokehouse · Post by **Smokehouse** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 8:49 pm

You may have problems on your system, but there are many many people who are running their MOTU FireWire unit on Windows XP SP2 (with the SP1 firewire drivers installed as described on many posts on this board and at the RME site in greater detail.) I hope that you can work through whatever system problem you are having -- but don't just assume that the thing is shite. Be methodical and you will get where you need to get.

kelldammit · Post by **kelldammit** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 6:54 am

wow. you've done everything i could think of and then some...
i hate doing the whole format/reinstall thing, but sometimes it does clear up weird problems...but with that already done, and still no joy...this is really frustrating.
i didn't see this in any of the posts...but have you tried a different firewire cable? it's probably a longshot, and something you've already done, but...
beyond that, all i could think of is trying to see if you can get it to work on another machine (at least you'd verify the hardware of the traveler itself.

kell

onlycito · Post by **onlycito** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:50 am

you have all your juices flowing towards a song...
only to have it crushed by technology that is not attentive to its many context.

i'm still looking for a solution...

thx to all of you who give a damn about the lost and broken musician.

theodour · Post by **theodour** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 1:10 pm

Hey guys, make sure you try a different cable.

The cable that came with my Traveler turned out to be causing me major trouble (pops and occasional failures) ... to the point I though it was broken. But just testing it with a another cable I had laying around, it worked fine (approaching two years now, I believe).

Also, try plugging it into a different computer (if that is an option) before forking out for another firewire card.

MOTUnation.com

Traveler? Crap!! (resolved... bad unit)

dam this is so depressing