I think I'm now safe to post this success story (knock on wood).
I was absolutely dumbstruck when I first installed and hooked up the newly bought Motu Ultralite to my newly bought MacBook Pro running Bootcamp. I'm one of the lucky ones who at first got nothing but digital noise waste when I first activated my ASIO engine. Never have I had exactly *such* an awful first impression on a sound card, even in Windows. But since the hardware is full of beautiful things I decided to go forth and try and fix it.
It's been a 1,5 week process but I now believe I have a fully working setup.
I know - for many of you this is nothing new - and a lot of this has been discussed all over this forum. But here is how I got mine working.
First the specs:
I have a Santa Rosa chipset MacBook Pro 15". That's Intel Dual Core T7500 @ 2.2 Ghz. 2Gb RAM. Texas Instruments Firewire Controller. NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT display adapter. Atheros AR5008 WLAN adapter. Marvell Yukon 88E8058 ethernet adapter.
All this running Bootcamp and Windows XP SP2.
Steps I took:
- First carry out and be familiar with traditional XP optimization for pro audio work. Check out for example: www.musicxp.com for tuning tips.
- A good, free tool to monitor DPC latencies and therefore your systems current capabilities for real-time audio - and the effects that different steps taken have - is called DPC Latency Checker. You can get it here:
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
- Install the Ultralite firmware and drivers as instructed. Note that I'm currently running 1.10 firmware and 3.6.7.3 drivers. I am no longer sure if downgrading was absolutely essential but at the time it did show improvement. Later steps taken might have rendered the downgrading step unnecessary.
- In the Device Manager, under network adapters:
Disable 1394 networking (important)
Bluetooth-devices (not sure if crucial, although likely so)
and
the WLAN adapter (in my case Atheros AR5008 - very important). Note that in my case disabling the WLAN adapter caused a full system lockup. This is discussed here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... ID=6410929
For me and many others, XP hotfix 893357 (WPA2 fix) fixes this problem and i was able to disable the WLAN adapter without total system freeze.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893357
If it doesn't work it's at least important to turn OFF the Radio of the WLAN adapter [Device Manager > WLAN Adaper > Properties > Advanced TAB > Radio On/Off > OFF]
- Next install three XP hotfixes, in this order, restarting after each install.
904412 (Firewire fix)
896256 (Multi processor fix)
885222 (Firewire fix)
- I did try installing newer/different drivers for the display adapter, the network and wlan adapters and internal sound device drivers. I don't think any of this is necessary at the end of the day. Most likely though if something did have improving effect, it would have been the display adapter drivers but initially SKIP this and carry out the next step...
- Right-click the desktop to get to the Display preferences. In the Settings-tab, click the Advanced button. Go to the Troubleshoot tab. Drag the Hardware Acceleration slider to NONE. This will namely disable NVidia's own control panel and it's settings.
- Finally, and this had a final MAJOR improvement. I disabled ALL STARTUP ITEMS in msconfig.
Go to the Start Menu, select Run. Type "msconfig" without the quotes and hit enter. Go to the Startup tab. UNCHECK every item. Restart.
Most likely what was causing trouble there was either NVIDIA, Bluetooth or Bootcamp related. I'm not sure but I will not go back to check, sorry
These were the steps that I believe finally took my Ultralite from a useless noise box into a perfectly working firewire interface. So far I have tested with 128 Buffer size, 4 active inputs and 6 active outputs.
Finally:
I know Windows has always been and utterly tricky OS for pro audio but Motu's windows drivers must still be the worst i've seen to date. I see all these people battling with these same issues, many of which end up selling away the device. Which is a shame for Motu, because the hardware is great. It's only the Windows drivers which can easily be called crap. I really really think they should do something about it - rather than close their eyes about it. At the moment it would only be fair that they put up a huge banner on their website saying: YOU MIGHT HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTIES GETTING THIS TO WORK ON WINDOWS ALTHOUGH WE SAY IT SUPPORTED.
Cheers,
antwan