Thanks! & Ricoh Firewire Chip Set Compatibility???

[RRabbi]

Ok... I tried disabling any hardware that I could in the BIOS, as well as all of the USB ports in Device Manager. Still, did not work. I also disabled lots of stuff in the device manager too, to see if there were any conflicts there. Still didn't work.

Called Belkin and got an RMA to return everything. Oh well.... So, based on the fact that others with Dell laptops are trying to use ExpressCards with MOTU products, I don't think it's a defective hardware issue with just my 828. The thing that makes me kinda peeved as that neither Dell, MOTU, or Belkin will take ownership of the problem... I just don't know what is incompatible with what... I'm assuming that it is simply Motu being incompatible with the ExpressCard technology, although they said they weren't at fault.

Makes me wonder how well a USB 2.0 Motu 828 MkII would work, and if there are any issues with that...

Has anyone been using the 828 MkII USB2 version for recording?

Dave

[calaveras]

as far as "turning off devices to see if they are the source of conflicts" there is a more orderly way to find this out.
Just go into control panels>system>hardware>device manager
then go to "view " and select "resources by connection".
This will show 4 groups, DMA, IO, IRQ and Memory.
If you have any obvious conflicts they will be under IRQ's.
Just click there and you will see a listing of all the IRQs on your system and the devices that use (or share) them. I recently did this to all the laptops in the store when I was at the Sony Style store in San Francisco. One of the sales guys asked me what the hell I was doind as if I was messing the computers up! I guess Sonay doesnt want consumers to know they have 6-7 devices sitting on a single IRQ in their laptops.
I have seen it said elsewhere that "IRQ's dont matter on a modern ACPI computer". Horsepuckey! I bought that hook line and sinker. Then I recently solved my DAW's instability at low latencies by moving the TC DSP card over one slot so it would stop sharing IRQ's with the firewire chip on the motherboard. Now it records just great at 2.2ms 24/88.1.
Often getting IRQs' to play nice is difficult. You may or may not be able to manually assign them in device manager. You may or may not be able to assigne them in bios. My laptops bios is effin close to useless. All I could do was turn off the modem! Make sure you write down your IRQ settings before you start playing with them though!

[calaveras]

so I did some tests today after doing the firewire fix for SP2. I was able to squeeze in a few more tracks before all hell broke loose. I was able to record 4 tracks while playing back a softsynth and 2 tracks. When I tried to play back 4 or 6 tracks plus the softsynth I couldnt record anything without glitches and teh now time halting in Sonar. I noticed though, that my little USB hard drive was blinking prettymuch in time with the glitches.
So either the USB and someother buss that is important are crossing or my little USB hard drive just totally blows. I am gambling that it is the latter. I got the hard drive enclosure for $2 (wholesale) and the hard drive is a refurb seagate(several years old though). I think I am going to drop a bill on a more serious external hard drive before I give up on the Ricoh firewire. I will need one eventually anyway even if I go with a firewire card. BTW I also tried it with a SD card in the 5 in one reader and without and it made no difference. Why would I do that? Well I know that Ricoh makes multi-function chips that handle 1394, SD/XD cards etc. That was just a little what if scenario.

[Guitarmuzic]

Thanks for the updates. Keep us posted on how that Ricoh chip is doing. I'm also using the Ricoh chip in my dell, so I'll let you know how it continues to work for me also. So far it seems ok with 3 or 4 audio tracks and 2 MIDI tracks with 2 virtual instruments... We'll see how long it lasts.

[calaveras]

well I picked up an acomdata 160gb drive. Not the biggest fastest or the smallest portabalest, but cheap before the rebate and dirt cheap with the rebate.
First I must say cursing curseword acomdata. About half a gig is stuck in some useless cdrom image with a bunch of silly shareware and a password protection. And it's in there in such a way that I had to enable windows services that nothing else uses just for windows to see the hard drive! That all aside, I got Sonar 6PE to record 8 tracks and play back 8 tracks of 88.1 24bit simultaneously. I am sure when I have more ram and a faster chip (and a faster internal drive) I will do just great on this cheap ugly laptop with the Ricoh firewire. So yeah. Ricoh firewire works here. So far.

[doubleJ]

I have an Asus A8jp with a ricoh firewire chip. I'm guessing that it is a combo chip, since the laptop also has a ricoh card reader.
I see other people working, but I can't even see the traveler with mine.
The interesting thing is that when I'm installing the 3.6.7.4 drivers it never pops up all the "didn't pass windows testing" or whatever that you have to continue through. It just says 1 of 5, 2 of 5, etc... and finishes. I'm guessing that's why it's not working.
I've tried 3.6.7.4, 3.6.7.3, and 3.5.3.2. None of them seem to work on my laptop.
Any ideas?
JJ

[calaveras]

well a couple things. I seem to remember that when you update motu FW drivers you need to utterly destroy any vestige of previous drivers. check the MOTU knowledbase for details. I think you might even have to get your hands dirty with a reg key or two.
Also, make sure your 1394 networking is disabled in network connections.
and check it out under device manager/hardware manager. does it say OHCI next to your 1394? Are there any yellow ! flags? look under view resources by connection and see if its sharing an IRQ with other stuff. I know in ACPI it is not supposed to matter, but it sometimes does. It VERY does.

[doubleJ]

I checked my services to see if something was disabled. I enabled a few things (I'm using tinyxp, btw...), but it didn't change anything.
JJ

[mikal4711]

just to add my two cents to this, I am a new MOTU user and have recently bought a Ultralight. due to the fact that my old Sony VAIO laptop crashed and burned. I bought a new HP Pavillion DV9000 series, wich has a ricoh chipset. i was planning to buy a new audio card anyways because my E-Mu 1616M was not going to get Vista support till late summer. But to my mistake i didn't play close enough attention to the Vista version that came with my Laptop. It came with Vista Ultimate 64. so I found that my options were very limited to the audio interface i could get. I decided to take a chance anyways and got the Ultralite. it works VERY well with my laptop and Ricoh firewire chipset. I am able to get buffer sizes of around 56 or less than a ms of latency. i say just buy it and if it doesnt work just return it. then you know for sure.

[arth]

I recently did this to all the laptops in the store when I was at the Sony Style store in San Francisco. One of the sales guys asked me what the hell I was doind as if I was messing the computers up! I guess Sonay doesnt want consumers to know they have 6-7 devices sitting on a single IRQ in their laptops.
I have seen it said elsewhere that "IRQ's dont matter on a modern ACPI computer". Horsepuckey! I bought that hook line and sinker. Then I recently solved my DAW's instability at low latencies by moving the TC DSP card over one slot so it would stop sharing IRQ's with the firewire chip on the motherboard.

Like many (if not most) users, you confuse IRQ with IRQL, most likely because in the very old PC architectures, there was a 1:1 relationship. An IRQ (indexed by a number) is a name of a software queue and not an interrupt. It's serviced by an interrupt, which may or may not be generated by one or more IRQLs. An IRQL (indexed by a letter) is an independent hardware interrupt line, which is hooked up to one or more devices. It's the IRQLs that have problems with conflicts. By moving a card over one slot, you often (but not always) change the IRQL, which can, indeed, help, if nothing else by reducing latency.
Just changing the IRQ number, however, does not help unless you have extremely old devices, i.e. ones that aren't ACPI compatible, but rely on a 1:1 mapping between interrupt and interrupt queue.

The Sony person did right to tell you to stop messing, because you were in over your head there. A little knowledge is dangerous. I'd have tossed you the hell out and told you never to come back.

(As an example, if you buy a new state of the art IBM/Lenovo laptop, it has everything that can be assigned an IRQ set to IRQ 11 by default. That's no problem at all, and actually frees up memory in interrupt mode, where the PC is seriously memory starved. The laptop actually becomes slightly slower if you go in and change it.)

Only if your PC is dead slow and can't service all interrupts on a queue does it matter whether the handlers are spread out in different queues. Then you effectively make some of the interrupt tasks more likely to be services and others more likely not to be serviced. But in that case, some interrupts are not served regardless, and you have a much bigger problem.
But whether your PC runs "handler1, then handler2" when IRQ 17 runs, or handler1 when IRQ11 runs and handler2 when IRQ17 runs makes no difference at all. They'll both be run just as often, and there's no "conflict".
Leave the IRQ assignments to those who actually know these things. You knowing a little about it is worse than nothing, and your anectdotal "evidence" is worthless unless you can explain the theory for why it (perceivedly) works on an ACPI PC. At best, it's a placebo effect, and at worst, you're messing up for other devices.

[Gerry G]

That is very interesting about IRQLs. Could you explain a little more how it works sequentially?

I had heard before that many devices on ACPI systems can share IRQs comfortably and without problems.

I have also seen that some latency settings of graphics cards are more likely to be culpable in screwing up sound ios.

My new Asus based duo core system (with Ricoh built in 4 pin FW port) gave me hell installing the Traveler MOTU drivers for a while but seemed to settle a couple of boots after applying the firewire fixes from Macrosoft and the duel core fix then tweaking the Sidspeed reg key to (3) as advised on the RME site. Oh I also had to roll back some of the FW drivers to 2001 as advised on RME.

This is consistent with what a lot of video camera sites have suggested in reference to firewire.

I believe that although these fixes are essential for fw800 devices they are also very helpful for fw400. This is because from what I have read it appears there is a choking effect in throttling it back to 100mps even though your actual transfer speed is way below that. This may well explain why the complaint above seems to say that it works with one or two tracks but loading them up causes problems.

I have not done a torture test yet, to see where it starts to break up but it seems to happily handle four or five tracks out and a record in.

Hope this is of use and would dearly love to hear more about the IRQLs and how they are ordered.

[RJH_MUSIC]

mikal4711 - What firmware and driver version are you using? I just purchased an HP pavillion zd9500T which is essentially the same computer with same OS. I bought the Ultralite because my Kore Controller (less than 6 ms latency) could not be recognized under Ultimate 64 even with driver update.

I cannot get skwatt out of it. Firmware is 1.15 and driver is 3.6.7.4, newest. The MIDI out port also won't work, or it is conflicting with my MTPAV. All drivers load fine and the unit is recognized, and I see activity in Kontackt, but no sound. If I change the audio driver to WDM or MME, I get noise but no audio. THere can't be too much diference in our computers.

[calaveras]

I recently did this to all the laptops in the store when I was at the Sony Style store in San Francisco. One of the sales guys asked me what the hell I was doind as if I was messing the computers up! I guess Sonay doesnt want consumers to know they have 6-7 devices sitting on a single IRQ in their laptops.
I have seen it said elsewhere that "IRQ's dont matter on a modern ACPI computer". Horsepuckey! I bought that hook line and sinker. Then I recently solved my DAW's instability at low latencies by moving the TC DSP card over one slot so it would stop sharing IRQ's with the firewire chip on the motherboard.

Like many (if not most) users, you confuse IRQ with IRQL, most likely because in the very old PC architectures, there was a 1:1 relationship. An IRQ (indexed by a number) is a name of a software queue and not an interrupt. It's serviced by an interrupt, which may or may not be generated by one or more IRQLs. An IRQL (indexed by a letter) is an independent hardware interrupt line, which is hooked up to one or more devices. It's the IRQLs that have problems with conflicts. By moving a card over one slot, you often (but not always) change the IRQL, which can, indeed, help, if nothing else by reducing latency.
Just changing the IRQ number, however, does not help unless you have extremely old devices, i.e. ones that aren't ACPI compatible, but rely on a 1:1 mapping between interrupt and interrupt queue.

The Sony person did right to tell you to stop messing, because you were in over your head there. A little knowledge is dangerous. I'd have tossed you the hell out and told you never to come back.

(As an example, if you buy a new state of the art IBM/Lenovo laptop, it has everything that can be assigned an IRQ set to IRQ 11 by default. That's no problem at all, and actually frees up memory in interrupt mode, where the PC is seriously memory starved. The laptop actually becomes slightly slower if you go in and change it.)

Wow I didnt notice this over the top hot headed response when you made it several months ago.
First off, simmer down! Just because you are on the internet does not give you the license to be rude.
You would have thrown me out of a store for looking at the hardware device manager? In most display models you cant change anything in the device manager from a guest profile. You shouldnt work in sales.
2nd I am an acredited computer technician. It's what I do for a living. IRQ sharing is still very much a problem. Not all modern computers are ACPI enabled btw!
3rd I am typing this from a Lenovo laptop, made this year. There is no irq 11 at all. A bunch of other ones though. Pretty much evenly dispersed with various system components. The only ones that are sharing are the ones concerned with the ricoh firewire/memory stick reader etc.

[RJH_MUSIC]

I di some poking around last night and found a few thins of possible interest. First, I took a llok at a Microsoft article on FIrewire Enumeration in WIN VISTA. When I looked in the registry entries directed to, I noticed that three devices, 1394 Host Controller, Integrated Web Cam, Infared device all share the same registry key identification code. That might be a problem. Next, I noticed that in trying to reboot and get the Ultralite to work, I sometimes get the infamous BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH with an IRQL error, so the ealier statements made here on IRQL's appear to be correct. Tonight I am going to back-up the registry and attempt to disable Web Cam and Inared devices and make the suggested enumeration changes in the registry keys that Microsoft suggests to see if there is any difference. If this fails, my last resort will be to purchase a Firewire Express Card and try again. If that fails, I will have to make a choice; Either Dump VISTA and load EIN XP Pro, or Take the Ultralite back and purchase an Edirol UA 100 USB interface. It is a shame, because I personally think the Ultralite has nicer features, except to say that right now, I have zero features.

Can anyone tell me if I am persuing the correct rrot or is it a waste of time?

RJ

[Franny]

How did anybody get the Ricoh to work with a Lenovo?
I have a T510 and an 828 Mk3. The PC at present does not even show the 828 in the device manager after several installs of the drivers...