2010/01/04 32fw-3.7.37320 new drivers and FW daisy-chaining!

[tristep]

Did someone try this 32fw-3.7.37320 new drivers?

I will and will report my findings,
I hope they will fix my problem (wich is not new at all on this forum): daisy-chain multiple motu fw cards.

Mine are 896HD and 8pre (1.03 firmware)

Antec Sonata Plus 550
Asus P5K-E WiFi-AP
(onboard firewire is agere 1394A but i've bought a firewire800 pci card with of course a Texas Instrument chipset)
Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600 with Noctua NH-U12P
4 X G.Skill Kit Extreme2 1 Go PC8500 PK
Asus EN8600GT SILENT/HTDP/512M
Western Digital Raptor - 36 (10000rpm): system
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 SATA - 200 - 8 : audio hd

My wish is to use xp for the moment (whatever SP until it works!)but i'm ready to switch to Vista if it appears better (i don't own it yet).
I want to use sonar 8 with asio drivers.

First goal: 16 simultaneous analog audio track recordings at 96k/24bit eventually with playback tracks (sonar) and cue mix monitoring into projects that can reach 40 audio or MIDI(connected to hardware samplers and keyboards) tracks or more if possible (for the moment, i think my hd would be the only thrue theorical limitation, thinking of raid but that's another story).

Second goal: it would be nice to have low buffers and short latency for some recordings, monitoring plug-ins softs like guitar rig for example.

It's generally working great with one motu in any case but i can't have the two daisy-chained working whithout lost of sync problems:
sudden flashing led on one unit happening frequently whithout apparent explanation or in some combination of FW drivers+MOTU drivers:
-when i open the motu audio console
-or when i open my DAW
-or when i switch from wdm to asio,
in most of case it happens on the one that is not selected as clock source into motu's config soft.
in some case it give me a BOSD.
When they sync "well" for some period of 1, 2, 3 minutes, i can say that my system seems to be working very well:
very low cpu load depending of course of the number of tracks and plug-ins i'm using.
HDD load depends of the number of tracks but i can at least play 40 audio tracks at 96khz/24bit.
I can record my 16 tracks for some variable periode until it happens again.
I can record 16 other tracks monitoring the 16 first with plugs and do it again...
In older versions of motu's drivers 3.6.7.X, i can run at 64 samples and monitor thru sonar using and monitoring plugs at very correct latency.

-I've tried SP3 "standard", SP1 FW driver rollback (in sp2 with microsoft hottfix + registry edit and in sp3), AVT drivers (all suggested in different posts of this forum)
-all tested with different motu drivers:
3.6.7.0 ; 3.6.7.3 ; 3.6.7.4 ; 3.8.1394 ; 3.8.1414

my other drivers are up to date, i've tryed to reduce useless windows services, have disabled everything (onboard audio, standard and wireless lan, and other things that were sharing the FW card IRQ even if i'm in APIC).

i've tryed on my toshiba satellite dual-core laptop the same way with onboard TI firewire (4pins) and with VIA FW400 x-press card.


Well, that's enough to make you understand that i really want it to work since i have spend a lot of money and time with this.

Let's see if this new release change something...

[tristep]

Well.

For the moment (and for long i hope), it seems to work perfectly.
In 96Khz/24bit, minimum latency is 128 buffer; 64 buffer minimum in 44Khz.
It works both in wdm and asio
I could record 16 audio tracks 96/24 buffer 128 from the 2 motu daisy-chained for a least 45mn without any sync problems.
The test i did after is to record the same way for 3mn, keep these tracks, add and record 16 news tracks the same way (but with 16 in play-back) and then redo it again (with 32 tracks in play-back).
With my internal sata HDD, i could get at least 48 or 64 maybe without problem (this hdd was not empty and "fragmented").
Then i did the same with an external usb drive ( 160 Giga, 7200rpm, only 10% full) i think i could record 2 times more so 80/96 tracks
Then i went to my 1 tera e-sata drive on its 200 gigas empty partition.
I couldn't reach 144 tracks because the processor was in red but 128 was "possible".
It was for test, but i'm happy to see that now my computer seems to work well, depending what i ask him to do, depending limitations of my hardware...
Then, i tried a guitar recording, monitoring thru the soft, using guitar rig, in a 20 track existing project (with plug-ins).
I could pay, record without any probem, this was not possible before.

So, since it works for me, i don't really know what adequation made it possible beetwen :
motu's hardware, motu's firmware,firewire cables (length, number of pins), firewire card ( chipset, rate, kind of slot ), firewire driver, motu's driver, OS (release and "SP numbers"), tweaks for optimize OS, DAW (release and update), audio drivers, hardware (cpu ram mb hdd),hardware drivers, graphic card settings, all the things that were disabled on my motherboard before installing OS...

If it interest someone, i can explain step by step what i did but i think the first step is to try that new driver release.

Well, what about playing music now?

[Advoc]

I think I may have a related problem.

I took my rig out to our gig last night to give it a run and see what happened.

I have an 896mk3 and an 8pre.. I have no idea what firmware version is running on the 8pre ( got it 2nd hand ) and the 896 is running 1.01. The 8pre is plugged into the 896 via firewire and the 896 is plugged into the computer.

I had a couple glitches at first with windows not recognizing that the 8pre was plugged in but I attributed that to a loose firewire cable.

We recorded 14 tracks from the direct out on the mixer. and periodically a few tracks would stutter for an amount of time. replaying the same 4 or 6 (i'm guessing) samples over and over again.

At first I thought this was because of the conflicting IRQ thing invovling video cards. But when I looked I realized that the tracks that were doing it were from the 8pre, and the 896 tracks were fine.

During playback later with Cubase open and both the 8pre and 896 turned on at some points it would start to stutter or cut out and lock up a bit even during the audio that had no problems when it recorded. Twice It locked the entire computer up with a high pitched tone coming from my monitors. through some trial and error I noticed that even when hitting the reset button on my comuter the ringing was still occurring until i switched off the 8pre. even with the 896 still on and plugged in the ringing stopped. So it makes me thing there may be something wrong with the way the 8pre is set up.

Again I don't think it has anything to do with the Videocard interfering because with only the 896 plugged in I have no problems, even when maximizing / minimizing windows and scrolling quickly around my DAW.

So these are what I see as some possible solutions:
1. Get a TI firewire card. And plug both motu's directly in rather than piggybacking.. I dont know if this would help or not.
2. Just use ADAT for the 8pre into the 896. I'd lose MIDI in the process but it's only 1 in and 1 out. I need a better MIDI interface anyway.

What do you think?

[TheRealRoach]

Nice thorough post. I'm glad it's working for you. It's a great setup if you can get it functioning.

My recommendation: create a drive image of your operating system's drive, and ideally one that is bootable.

The nature of computers is that over time a working system will turn into a malfunctioning system. A drive image will allow you to get back to your working configuration in about 20 min, instead of a whole day's worth of reformatting, reinstalling, reconfiguring, etc.

[tristep]

Hello Therealroach.

I'm glad you consider my work.
Your posts on many forums were helpfull to me to try to understand all this business.

What soft do you recommend to create an image of my system?
(i don't trust ghost).

Hello Advoc.

I have used my FW cards connected optically for 2 years before january when i managed to use my system daisy-chained.

I have to say that it was a problem for me, due to the 896hd optical possibilities (1 in / 1 out) that is only able to operate 4 channels in 96khz, i could only get 12 cannels in the same time.
I think this is not the case with the 896mk3 so you will be able to get all your inputs in 96khz.
There were still some loss of sync for me, but not so frequently and i was able to work this way.
The benefice if you use MOTU's real-time monitoring is to manage all your inputs in a single window.

I recommend a TI firewire card as the entire world does it, but you have to dig a little,
kind of slot? PCI / PCI EXPRESS / PCI X-PRESS (laptop)/ PCMCIA
rate? 400 / 800
number of pin for cable? 4 / 6 / 9

I really think all this details can have some importance for many reasons.
Mine is PCI, FW800 with a 9 pin port (800) and two 6 pin ports (400)
I connect the 896 to the 9 pin port with a short 6-9 FW cable.
You didn't mention your computer, but i recommend you to read some posts about equivalent system before buying anything.


Good luck.

[tristep]

Finally i went back to my internal HDD.

After doing music (not testing) here is what i founded:

The e-sata gave me some sync problems since this port shares the FW's IRQ or produce a pci bus overload, or something like that.
(loss of sync; or sometimes when i press play,nothing happens, the computer seems to wait for something, and it makes sonar crash...)

It seems to work fluently when i go back to my internal hdd.

I will report any findings..

[TheRealRoach]

Hello Therealroach.

I'm glad you consider my work.
Your posts on many forums were helpfull to me to try to understand all this business.

What soft do you recommend to create an image of my system?
(i don't trust ghost).

I would recommend Paragon's software. It is easy to configure, and in the even of a system failure, the recovery discs are bootable and the whole process only takes about 20 min to restore the system!