MOTU 828mkII or Traveller skipping and dropping audio

[tomk358]

I'm at the end of my wits. I have an 828mkII, and a friend's Traveler. Both work fine on other computers. I bought a new laptop- a Toshiba Tecra Core2Duo, 2GB RAM. It has a built in TI chipped firewire port w/ 4pin connector. It has XPPro SP2 installed.

When I play audio from various audio software including Windows Media, Ableton Live, Forte Enemble, every 7-15 seconds the audio cuts out, and comes back in a second or 2. Sometimes if I send it a plain sine wave/test tone, it starts warbling like a bird. Basically, both audio interfaces are useless right now.

I have tried the following:
1) both the newer and the older MOTU drivers (32fw and 3.6.7.3).
2) the Windows Hot fix 885222 v2
3) the RME webpage method for rolling back to 1394 SP1 drivers
4) the usual tweaks to XP:
-background services get priority
-fixed pagefile size to 4GB
-turned off all videocard acceleration
-set to windows classic view
-turned off all fancy windows animations
5) disabling the networking on the 1394 card

Any ideas? I'm so frustrated with this, I've put nearly 8 hours into this already, and am still at square 1.

[splatterbass]

do you still have another 1394 installed on your system?
i have a soundblaster audigy 2 with 1394. the fire wire on the audigy has to be disabled or it gives me problems.

[tomk358]

I only had the onboard 1394, but this weekend I went out and bought a PCMCIA firewire card w/ TI chips and 6-pin ports, it showed the same behavior. I also borrowed a friend's M-Audio Firewire 410.

I discovered that if I set my buffer to 512, the dropouts go away. This was a bit disheartening since I easly am able to hit 192 buffers on my desktop, and on my friend's laptop.

Is 192 buffer size asking for too much? What is a normal buffer size for 2 channels of 24/96 audio w/ the 828mkII?

-Tom

[splatterbass]

i have tried all kinds of settings and get wierd stuff happening at anything above 512.
my rig.

p4 duo @2.4 ghz 1066 fsb
4 gigs ram 800 mghz
c:\ 40 wd raptor
d:\ 150 gig wd raptor
XP pro x64
Sonar 6

i find that buffers set to 512 is fine, i am working on my bands album right now, all tracks @ 24 bit 48 khz, one song right now is at 56 tracks running realtime fx`s ( a bunch of plugins ) plus MIDI tarcks ( more to come ) and everything has been running smooth. lots of headroom for more tracks.

buffer size is the size of info chunks piped down the frewire. an 800 card might make the buffer size larger, but it has been running fine for me, so i have no reason to go spend the extra money.

hope the settings work for you. as with any performance system, tweak tweak tweak. lol

[tomk358]

Don't you mean wierd stuff happens when you set the buffer LOWER than 512?

[CMurph]

Who manufactured your onboard firewire and your PCMCIA card? What sort of odd behavior is happening?

[tomk358]

Both the onboard and the pcmcia FW ports are TI chipset.

[chriscomfort]

Sounds strange. I have an old Sager P4 laptop w 2 gig of RAM. The built in 4 pin worked okay but I opted to run my 828 MkII from an Adaptec DuoConnect AUA-1422 pcmcia card. It provides 2 USB, 1 FW 6 pin and 1 FW 4 pin. I got great results from the fw 6 pin. I have no idea what chipset it has. I just know it worked great.

[splatterbass]

actually i tried running buffer settings up as high as they would go, and kept trying the next setting down till everything stabilised, that was at 512.
i would like to run higher, but 512 has been working rock solid for me.