Vista 64 w/2408mk3 and 424 - NO SOUND!

[mburwell]

I am running Vista 64 w/AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ 3GB ram

My studio is Sonar 6PE based.

I have installed per MOTU instructions, and all recommended advice, order, etc. The I/O appears in Sonar to be selected for routing, etc, but I can produce no sound whatsoever. No sound from windows (such as system sounds, media player, etc) no sound from Sonar, no sound from input devices (such as my TM-D1000 board via TDIF). Nothing.

I have read many posts here and see that some have had good luck getting their system rolling.

Can anyone provide some help for me?

[Iomegaman]

How much RAM?

MOTU is working on updating drivers where 4 gigs of ram are used the motu units don't play any audio.

I just got my ultralite to work.

[mburwell]

3GB ram.

Late last night I got mine to work as well. I installed in XP SP2 with zero issues so I uninstalled all software/drivers in Vista 64 and then, of course, with the card physically pulled out of the machine, reinstalled all drivers, shut down, reinstalled the card and for no reason it worked this time. It's available in Sonar and I actually loaded up some projects and was off and running.

BUT I still have a few issues.

a) I cannot get my Tascam TM-D1000 to communicate with the 2408mk3 via TDIF. I've read some things about word clock challenges but also that they don't apply to the mk3 and mk2 only the older 2408. I am just not sure how to make this work.
b) This may be off topic for this particular posting but I cannot get latency in Sonar lower than 23ms! In my old setup, which included an M-Audio Delta TDIF card running in XP SP2 I could dial latency down to as low as 1.3ms. This was perfect when tracking vocals.

Final comment - with my test runs of a few projects in a 64 bit enviromment vs. XP: the project completely loaded in 1/10th the amount of time (no "busy" messages!). Also, the processor load was also less than half what it was before. This was encouraging. Time will tell if working in 64 bit is advantageous. I just need to resolve the issues stated above. (By the way, this was with no process overrides or adjustments to Vista)

[Iomegaman]

I can tell you that at this stage of the game Xp will out perform Vista, this WILL change as more companies realise that Microsoft will not be supporting Xp in the future.

Right now Sonar does not support Xp64 because Microsnot will not.

As far as your word clock issues, I have no experience with your equipment, but in my experience sometimes switching the master/slave relationship helps.

Since TDIF is a Tascam only standard, I suggest you check their tech links for help on that.

My ultralite went thru the same driver/app/uninstall/reinstall process to get it working, but I finally got a beta driver to deal with the +2gig ram bottleneck.

Hopefully Motu can get the driver issues resolved so everyone can play.

[mburwell]

I went with MOTU specifically because of their advert that they had Vista 64 drivers. Now that the MOTU is finally working in Vista I am happy, but the latency issue is quite unsettling. Additionally, the TDIF interface is also why I chose MOTU. My units not being able to communicate also puts me dead in the water. I opted for the 2408mk3 thinking it would integrate with my existing equipment. I am sure there is a solution out there but I just haven't found it.

[billruys]

This may be off topic for this particular posting but I cannot get latency in Sonar lower than 23ms! In my old setup, which included an M-Audio Delta TDIF card running in XP SP2 I could dial latency down to as low as 1.3ms.

Go into the MOTU PCI Audio Console and look for the drop-down box that says "Samples Per Buffer". Drop this down to, say, 128. Then, launch Sonar and re-run the wave profiler.

See how you go with that. If everything is fine, you could try lowering it even more for lower latency. If you get crackles or pops, bump it up to say 256. Remember to re-run the wave profiler in Sonar's audio options dialog box every time you change this (assuming you're using WDM in Sonar).

[billruys]

I went with MOTU specifically because of their advert that they had Vista 64 drivers. Now that the MOTU is finally working in Vista I am happy, but the latency issue is quite unsettling. Additionally, the TDIF interface is also why I chose MOTU. My units not being able to communicate also puts me dead in the water. I opted for the 2408mk3 thinking it would integrate with my existing equipment. I am sure there is a solution out there but I just haven't found it.

I presume you set the appropriate bank in the console to TDIF? Does the TDIF LED light up for the bank you elected as the TDIF bank? Do any of the input LEDs for that bank show activity when you send signal from your TM-D1000?

[mburwell]

billruys and Iomegaman thank you so much for your replies. This topic is in 2 parts so I'll reply to both issues. Again, thank you.

A) Latency: I made the change you suggested and brought it down to 128 samples per buffer, re-ran the wave profiler in Sonar 6 PE and successfully achieved a latency setting of 2.9ms. In a small project this was fantastic, but I got audible pops and clicks from a 24 track project with 13 plug-ins. Adjustment to 5.8ms made dramatic improvement, and adjustment to 8.2ms completely eliminated all pops and clicks on playback. I obviously have some additional work to do here.
B) TDIF interface: Yes the banks light up for input and output on my 2408mk3. Resolution: I set my Master Clock Select on the TM-D1000 to TDIF-1 A with word length A:24bit and now have success! Audio is flowing in and out exactly as I had hoped it would.

All these tests and my setup has been done with no system tweaks whatsoever. I am still running the Aero GUI and have not turned off things like 1394 networking or any background processes, etc. With some additional time spent I am sure I can get my system working even more smoothly and efficiently.

In a very short period of time, I am happy with my system speed. One small example is audio import and most especially export. Less than half the time spent waiting for things like loading and exporting. So far so good in a complete 64-bit environment.

I never posted my system setup:
AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.21GHz
Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI MoBo (nForce4 SLI chipset)
3GB RAM DDR400 (generic brand - not matched - 2ea 1GB sticks and 2ea 512 sticks)
Sapphire ATI Radeon X550 128MB Graphics Card (PCIE)
Vista Ultimate 64-bit
MOTU PCIX-424 card w/2408mk3
Sonar 6 Producer Edition installed for 64-bit environment

I just finished and shipped off for duplication a 12 track CD project last week and sure wish I could have been in this environment during that process!

Finally I want to thank the operator of this forum and those participating. This is exactly the kind of great solution-outcome a well run forum should produce. Bless you all!

[billruys]

Cool, so glad you got things working

A) Latency: I made the change you suggested and brought it down to 128 samples per buffer, re-ran the wave profiler in Sonar 6 PE and successfully achieved a latency setting of 2.9ms. In a small project this was fantastic, but I got audible pops and clicks from a 24 track project with 13 plug-ins. Adjustment to 5.8ms made dramatic improvement, and adjustment to 8.2ms completely eliminated all pops and clicks on playback. I obviously have some additional work to do here.

I don't know if you spend much time on the Cakewalk forums, but from all the talking to people I have done, the consensus seems to be that Vista 64 has nothing on XP at low latency. So, I think 8.2ms to get rid of the pops and clicks is about as good as it gets in Vista 64.

Like you, I'm running Sonar 64-bit on Vista 64. I'm running it on a core 2 quad. My old DAW is a dual core Athlon 64 running Windows XP. I can tell you that my old Windows XP DAW is capable of much lower latency than my much more powerful Vista DAW.

I personally don't think Vista 64 is ready for prime time yet. I'm not 100% convinced it will ever be as good as Windows XP was as a DAW platform.

[mburwell]

Okay back again and this time I have a new issue. I had my system up and running smoothly and I was happy. But I needed to do a new install of Vista 64 and thought it would be a no brainer to set my system up again. But I downloaded the new drivers from MOTU and each time I try and install, PCI Audio Console never loads. I uninstall drivers, remove the 424 card, install drivers again, reinstall the 424 card and I get CueMix Console and SMPTE Console but no Audio Console. I cannot properly setup my system without being able to access the samples per buffer settings.

[reeper]

yep... x64 drivers... cant get em to work here (aswell) vista x64.
poop

[mburwell]

Okay so I am back up and running again. Got it all to work and I have a fully operating system again. Funny how if you simply need to keep reinstalling until it works. That is certainly not the best way for it to happen, but that's how it ended up woriking for me. Lame I know.

[JohnLance]

I have essentially all of the same problems as above.

I started a Motu Tech Support Issue, but they closed it.

The 64 bit drivers do NOT interface properly with Vista 64 bit. I have 4 Gigs of ram, and may soon increase it to 8, but I want to be sure things are working pretty decently before going ahead with this as the Windows XP partition I have will likely go away at that point.

I have a Gigabyte P35 series motherboard with the F9a bios installed. It pays to check this for the motherboards. Gigabyte had problems with DPC latency being so high that it could mess up real time streaming of audio (or probably real time anything). See http://www.thesycon.de/eng/home.shtml and under "free downloads" look up the DPC Latency Checker. Installing the latest bios for me brought this latency down to less than 150 micro seconds, where before it would spike to over 850 micro seconds. The DPC stuff ties up the CPU processing in a way that keeps other things from being processed. That is the best way I can describe this.

Anyway, the Motu drivers behave extremely poorly with Vista Ultimate 64 bit, and I've been extremely displeased with Motu Tech Support and their failing to address this issue to any valid resolution. Anything, like "we know about this and we're working on it" would have been good. No. They just closed the issue and called it resolved.

I can just barely get Windows Audio to work with the Motu drivers. I can get ASIO applications to work fine. With my Quad Core Q6600 I am able to get down to just under 4ms one way latency with a moderately loaded project in Nuendo, which isn't too bad. I just have to keep fudging with Windows Audio to recognize the Motu drivers and also adjust the drivers to be at 512 or 256 samples per buffer for Windows Audio to work at all with the drivers.

[mburwell]

8.2ms is best I can achieve and that is very lame for recording. I agree that the drivers just flat out do not work well and that is frustrating!

[billruys]

8.2ms is best I can achieve and that is very lame for recording. I agree that the drivers just flat out do not work well and that is frustrating!

Just an update from me to say that even with the same Vista 64 bit drivers, Sonar 8 has been a major improvement regarding the minimum latency I can work at. CPU usage is lower in Sonar 8 (vs Sonar 7, or even Sonar 6), so now I can get similar latency with Vista 64 as I was seeing in Windows XP. This is pretty cool.

Not sure what the guys at Twelve Tone Systems did, but the CPU Kernel time is way lower now, so the Motu 64 bit driver just seems to work more efficiently in version 8. Good news for us MOTU/Sonar/Vista64 users