basic ways to troubleshoot (ultralite mkII)

[davesec]

hi,

i have a laptop that runs windows xp, and a motu ultralite (mkII i think) that i bought in 2007

i haven't used this thing very much. i used it on a friend's laptop briefly and it seemed to work, but then when we did some recording there were all these random glitches in the recording and nobody knew how to fix it

i'd like to give this thing one last try and see if it's possible to get this to work with my system without spending a million dollars on new hardware or software.

as mentioned, it's a toshiba laptop, 3gb ram, and there's a generic firewire expresscard. i am running xp (32 bit) on it. it's hooked up to the ultralite which is running firmware version 1.15 (it has been running this for years, i was surprised to see there wasn't a newer firmware out). i downloaded this driver:

FireWire and USB Audio Driver Installer for Windows 4.0.42546

and it seemed to install properly. after installing it, i noticed in my start menu i had the following programs:

CueMix FX
MOTU Audio Console
MOTU SMPTE Console

i plugged a mic into the xlr input in the front, and by looking at the screen on the ultralite i can see it's responsive. when i turn the motu on, the computer recognizes it and i get that little 'ta-da' sound.

if i open up CueMix FX, it seems to be laggy. if i drag my mouse over any of the levels or pots it takes a good half second to update in the little black screen in the upper right hand

while typing this, things just went crazy and there is now tons of clicking and crackling in my headphones. all the levels are just going nuts on the ultralite and the main out 1-2 meter of cuemix is going nuts..

after a couple of minutes of fooling around with CueMix FX, my computer freezes and the screen goes black and i have to reboot.

i have an old copy of cubase sx3, but i can't even load the program anymore now that i've installed the MOTU drivers.

i'm willing to give this a few hours of my time to troubleshoot. can anyone help me? is there a simple program or step-by-step system that will allow me to figure out what's going on or where the problem is? i haven't been very happy with this thing since i bought it (and paid way too much for it since i live in canada).

thanks!
dave

[davesec]

After rebooting about thirty times things seem to be a little better.

I can load cubase and actually record using the MOTU.

New issues:

After recording a few small samples successfully, the MOTU went crazy again and all the bars on the 'analog out' part of the green

screen started going haywire. This stopped after a few seconds. When I clicked 'Record' in cubase the click (which I had turned on)

was like 40x louder in my headphones and sounded like it had been bitcrushed. (i am listening to everything through a pair of

headphones connected to the ultralite). - this has actually happened twice now, same effect. the sound of the click changes which is weird. the burst of noise again lasted maybe 5 seconds.

This is also weird - I'm using the "MOTU Audio ASIO" driver with internal clock source. It says I'm experiencing an input latency of 12.8ms and output latency of 23.5ms. However I don't seem to be experiencing any latency whatsoever? I just recorded three separate tracks on top of each other in cubase, and had no problems with latency at all, they all sync up perfectly to the click and they all play back perfectly to the click.

if anyone has any new suggestions i'd appreciate it. i'm kind of just trying different things but would like to get this stable enough to record.

[davesec]

okay, after one of these bursts of noise, not only is the click sounding like it's peaking, i just tried recording something and the whole thing sounds like it's cranked and peaking and in the red.

any ideas?

[davesec]

okay

went into control panel/sounds and audio devices/audio tab and changed :

sound playback FROM Realtek HD Audio Output TO MOTU Phones 1-2

sound recording FROM Realtek HD Audio Input TO MOTU Mix1 1-2 (Whatever that means)

MIDI music playback FROM Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth TO Ultralite

this seemed to help the crackling, i was able to play around for almost 20 minutes without incident. funny enough, it was after i stopped that the crackling started. i closed cubase and notice that all my sounds (Which i'm still listening to through headphones connected to the ultralite) sounds like they've been amplified by about 100000x.

however, this goes away after a few minutes.

still trying to figure this all out!!