I run flawless Motu setup what about you?

[iplaymexicanmusic]

I am so tired of reading all the bad vibes in these forums about MOTU.
People you need to do research before putting your setups together...I see that 95% of the problem in here is YOU!!!
The first thing you need to realize is that your hardware and software is NOT going to work right out of the box...there are settings and configurations that will need to be done....especially on a PC!!!
If you do not know how to do this, or do not have someone that does....then you should NOT BE CONSIDERING THIS AS YOUR RECORDING OPTION!!!!!
Why dont you just buy 1 of those all in 1 kind of deals like a Roland 2480 etc ??????


I am running a Motu 1296,Motu HD192,PCI 424 card, Quad Core 3.0, 4 gigs of ram, Intel chipset, 3 hard drives, Midiman 8x8 (yes that tragic device), Sonar 8 PE, Waves Diamond pack, Nomad Factory (complete bundle), Korg Legacy synths and much much more (i have 24 channels of awesome Preamps!!)

I can record 24 inputs at a time and have taken my track count up to 168 (gave up after that)
I can run 5 plug ins on each track up to 67 tracks before any noticeable CPU spikes.....

Did my setup install painlessly and did everything work right away?
HELL NO!!!!!!!!!!!

It took me 2 weeks of research and configuring to get everything working. The one thing that gave me hell was the midisport 8x8...but I resolved it.
The key is that I know about these things...Ive been doing it for a while now. I came from a Protools HD2 setup...and let me tell you...my current setup gives that PTHD setup a good run for its money!!!
As far as quality is concerned....the Converters on my Motu 1296 and 192 are freakin awesome!!!!! I've worked with the Digidesign 192, 96, and Apogee ada 16x converters....let me say motu hit this one out of the park!

The only complaints you'll here from me is the monitoring with effects and Control surface...I miss these things with my Protools HD setup and this is not Motu's fault plus I have found a work around it...other than that....I love it!!!


You need to know...you are doomed if you dont.
So basically what im saying is if your a rookie in this field of computer audio...you better do your homework or find someone that can do it for you...cuz if you dont you are f*****


Have a nice day
=)

[majdid]

MOTU Propaganda!
in my book, when a company releases faulty drivers that have such a big issue of mistakenly routing the outputs, then something is wrong.

they definitely fixed that with the new version, BUT :
1) it took months
2) their tech support still s*cks

i guess that is why there are so many negative vibes in this forum. and i think also that if motu have taken care of their tech support cases, and taken the time to respond to their loyal customers, and have put in place a forum with a motu products specialist moderator to respond and help people, then this forum which we all love and respect will definitely have much more of a "good vibes" into it.

my 2 cents...

[TheRealRoach]

Don't feed the trolls.

[James Steele]

MOTU Propaganda!

I don't think that post came from a MOTU person.

Personally, I wouldn't have put it quite the same way, but he has a point. I see this all the time in the Mac oriented forum. New users sign up for this board simply to scream at the top of their lungs how MOTU sucks and this or that doesn't work and a good part of the time it's because... well, excuse me for being blunt... they're idiots. But since I don't make people pass an IQ test to join here, that's what we have to deal with. Often they figure out that it's user error eventually, but they don't come back and post a retraction when it turns out it was THEIR mistake.

There's also another good point: if you're not a tech kind of person or have someone who can help you, you'll likely have problems setting up your DAW. They're some people whom I wouldn't trust to operate a weed whacker trying to hook up and trouble shoot a DAW. People with zero computer experience take a bunch of stuff home in boxes, it doesn't work immediately, then they log on here and flame away at MOTU.

I'm not saying a lot of the Windows guys don't have some problems. Let's face it... the variety of possible hardware configurations possible create unique problems/pitfalls for a non-technical user wishing to set up a DAW. It's one of the reasons I switched from my IBM PC-XT machine running Cakewalk 1.0 with MPU-401 interface back in the late 80s, to a Macintosh SE and Performer and/or Vision. It cost me a LOT more money than a PC, but the headaches I think I avoided made it worth it. I'm not dissing the Windows platform at all here... please don't misunderstand me. I'm just saying a DAW newbie needs a lot more handholding and advice from an experienced person when setting up those systems.

[iplaymexicanmusic]

Sorry guys for ranting...i meant no disrespect.
Just kinda errked me about all the negatives...I really wanted to write a positive.

lol...im not a MOTU employee....although i think that must be a nice gig!


Also...im here to help with anyone having problems.
Hardware and Software configurations requires such a level of expertise that i cannot even begin to explain with words!
For example I had my video card on a shared IRQ....that threw the whole system out of whack!
I had my ram on 2 different channels....which led to drop out city in Sonar 8...

This doesnt even begin to scratch the surface of problems i had to weed out to get my system to where its at right now.

So reading all these post about this and that....I went through prolly 100% of the problems I read here....but I knew this would happen...and was prepared on how to troubleshoot and solve them.


With that being said....OMG the converters are freaking awesome on the 1296 and hd192!!! Holly crap!!!
My cousin has the Apogee 16x and I can not tell the difference!!!!
So that has to be nice and worth something right?


Thanks guys

ps
by the way if ya like Tejano Music look us up on myspace


www.myspace.com/gruponemesis

[JerrickCrites]

First motu ultralite mk3 was a dud. Tried on multiple systems at my house, friends house, and guitarcenter and me built up 2 other systems to troubleshoot on. Also tried the cds drivers and newer online drivers. The hardware was just dead.

Guitarcenter gave me a new one, installed on a pc, was perfect from there. Some setting in motu depending on what mics im using, what im micing, how loud a plyer plays and what not, but that isnt anything wrong at all.

I can only do 8 tracks at a time, then MIDI, but it always works.

I have a flawless motu setup.

[retrograde]

For folks running firewire devices, no amount of research and configuring helps when the drivers may be flawed.

We have HD192 running a Mac Pro in room A - no problems from the getgo.

Our 896HD on Windows XP SP3 platform (update from SP1) in room B was a complete clusterf__k until we reverted to SP1 Asio drivers and older Motu firewire drivers. Motu support was no help on this problem at all. Without the efforts of guys like Mike Rocha we'd still have a sputtering clicking nightmare.

Motu needs to be more aggressive and customer oriented in the Windows/firewire arena.

Geoff

[Mark S]

ditto on the firewire drivers. (SP1) The AVT drivers were the only way to get my XP system working with an 896 hd and and 8pre. And a friend comes over with his Traveler and with some tweaking links up fine. Haven't really pushed it all but in time we will.

When it works, it works. Next time though, I'll go optical,..

[billruys]

For folks running firewire devices, no amount of research and configuring helps when the drivers may be flawed.

We have HD192 running a Mac Pro in room A - no problems from the getgo.

Our 896HD on Windows XP SP3 platform (update from SP1) in room B was a complete clusterf__k until we reverted to SP1 Asio drivers and older Motu firewire drivers. Motu support was no help on this problem at all. Without the efforts of guys like Mike Rocha we'd still have a sputtering clicking nightmare.

Motu needs to be more aggressive and customer oriented in the Windows/firewire arena.

Geoff

They need to be more involved in the Windows platform in the PCIX/PCIe arena too. Their half baked PCIX/PCIe-424 Vista drivers, which are now around 2 & 1/2 years old have me asking myself hard questions about selling my MOTU gear and starting again with something that is actually supported on Windows. It would be hard to match the connectivity I have with the 2408 Mk3 & 24I/O, but I'm tired of the problems I encounter with poorly written Vista drivers. To be fair, MOTU aren't alone in this (I migrated from a pair of M-Audio Delta 1010 after waiting years for Vista working x64 drivers).

Ultimately, MOTU is failing to deliver to Windows users. If things are broken, I don't expect to wait 2 or 3 years for a driver update to fix it. Audio specs really don't mean much when an audio interface is only as good as it's driver.

EDIT: Wow, never thought I'd be saying this, but all my problems are fixed! - See this thread

[hswin]

Hey Folks,

My setup is familiar to some of the previous posts. I started with one MOTU 896HD and gradually worked my way up to 3 896HD's. I chose the 896HD's because of their versatility of input connections and signal level match. I later added a MOTU Ultralite. I now can record 26 microphone inputs, 6 line inputs, and one MIDI input in one pass! I have recorded some of our musical programs at our church with 32 tracks and over two hours of music.

I have all of the MOTU devices on one FW daisey-chain, and an external hard drive on a USB input of a laptop. I use the AVT FW drivers, and MOTU's 3.6.7.0 driver. The laptop has a FW port with the on board TI chip. I also have a PCMCIA card with a TI chip and 2 FW ports on it for backup.

Usually for mixdowns, I use only the Ultralight to minimize the bandwidth required for 4 FW devices. While using the Ultralite for mixdowns, I rarely have any problems as some other posts have mentioned.

Anyhow, that's my story.

[dare]

I am so tired of reading all the bad vibes in these forums about MOTU.

Sigh - I wonder why -

People you need to do research before putting your setups together...I see that 95% of the problem in here is YOU!!!
The first thing you need to realize is that your hardware and software is NOT going to work right out of the box...there are settings and configurations that will need to be done....especially on a PC!!!
If you do not know how to do this, or do not have someone that does....then you should NOT BE CONSIDERING THIS AS YOUR RECORDING OPTION!!!!!

Do I really need to comment this ?


Once I had a Creamware Scope card. It simply wouldn't work in specific scenario, and there was a guy calling me noob, throll and everything, but the fact was that their driver was 10yrs old - and when I explained to him the non-working scenario-he asked me if I know how many programming hours does it take to correct it and why would anyone use such setup... Stick to what is working... He also suggested me to buy a specific motherboard and specific components, but the thing is that if some manufacturer sticks to certain protocols in making equipment it will work just fine.

I see a similar pattern here. If manufacturer mistakes somewhere, the solution is not to disable themes, turn off icons and everything else. Manufacturer should take all that in account when he builds a device. If I need to be an expert to simply connect MOTU on my PC and get the job done, and on the other side if I put for example RME right out of the boxand it works, then something else is wrong, not my expertise in disabling all the services in windows... If they claim MOTU is windows 7 ready, then it should work fine along superfetch, power saving etc... In motu they should foresee the use of those services and accomodate the driver. So in this way MOTU is not fully win7 compliant. As for the hardware - if it works with RME it should also work with MOTU - right ? If not then find me one that works... As until now, every piece of hardware has questionable and quite fragile functionallity. I even used Delta M-Audio 66 and it works rock solid! Right out of the box!

[eoneel]

When I first switched over to a DAW based system for recording music decided to go the laptop route. I am now using a ADK pro audio laptop that is f'n awesome, 7200 rpm external Glyph drive, running on Sonar 7 with an Ultralite MK1, and I honestly could'nt ask for more solid results. Having an onboard Texas Instrument chipset for me was a huge factor in getting good performance out of the Ultralite. I tried using an Ultralite with a HP dv9000t, and even using a TI firewire express card to connect the Ultralite, I was not getting good results. Most of the time the computer would not even recognize the Ultralite. I have heard that even if you use a TI firewire express card to override the ricoh chipset, that it still somehow can cause problems if your onboard chipset isn't TI to begin with. I do not know if this is entirely true or not, but ever since I have been using a computer with onboard TI it has been smooth sailing for me. One thing's for sure though, any computer that I get in the future will be specifically built for DAW work.

[VigilantSound]

I just wanna say real quick like, that I have never had a problem with my MOTU 828mk3 that wasn't caused by my own mistakes and I think if more of you guys would except the fact that you are not pro computer engineers and stop trying to place the blame on others and instead take the time to learn about what you using, your problems my cease to exist as mine have.......Just think about it....

[dare]

When I first switched over to a DAW based system for recording music decided to go the laptop route. I am now using a ADK pro audio laptop that is f'n awesome, 7200 rpm external Glyph drive

Well I didn't say my setup do not run well but I had to do a few tweaks and find some good quality hard-to-find hardware components, RAID disk etc... I am just against that way of using my equipment. It should work with any FW and with any CPU... Take graphic cards, for example. They are way more complicated than audio interface yet they work flawlessly on a wide variety of hardware setups... And there are various levels of IT expertise... Not all of us are noobs!

Take the misrouted drivers version... Is it my ignorance that caused that ???

DO I HAVE TO BE IT EXPERT TO USE THIS HARDWARE ??? THEY DIDN'T MENTION IT IN THE COMMERCIALS!

I hope you understood what I am trying to say...

[VigilantSound]

Take graphic cards, for example. They are way more complicated than audio interface yet they work flawlessly on a wide variety of hardware setups...

Graphics cards are notorious for causing problems with audio interfaces...