Third Party 1394 bus controller drivers for XP and Vista

[TheRealRoach]

I dont know if its me using the 3.74 drivers.. or just time.. as i havent even tried to install it in about a week and a half but kind sir.. im back in action card is working fully.

I cant even begint to explain how happy i am.

Ok good.

So another question I would get a poping sound from the card sometime.. and id have to wiggle and wiggle the volume knob until i found the right spot for non poping sound. Is that one of the issues the sp2 and sp3 firwire drivers caused? or does that seem more mechanical?

"Non-popping sound" I really have no idea what you're talking about there. Can you describe the popping sound in more detail? In any case I think you should start a new thread as I doubt that your problems have to do with the 1394 bus controllers.

[MidusTouch]

ok.. new probelm.. sound card is seen but i can get any sound to route outside of cubse anymore.. its got out 1 and 2 set for monitor outs? yes i have the 896 so i have out 1-8 then i have main outs.. so which channels are they labeled as in cubase? because as of not i am gettting nothing

[James Steele]

To noisegate. Why don't you let them work through this issue. If you want to go shill for Focusrite, go do it somewhere else. Thanks.

[Ratona]

This thread is very intresting.
My setup:
Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop
Windows Vista Home Preium
Intel(R)Core(TM)2CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
Memory: RAM 2.00GB
System: 32 Bit
Recording w/Sonar 8 Producer Edition
Sound Card: Motu 8-pre
Yamaha S90ES Keyboard

The firewire port is using RICOH OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller which as I understand it controls my express slot also.

My system works. I can achieve lower latences and stay in low latency ranges when disabling stuff in my device manager and prior to loading sonar using asio etc.. the latences ocassionally jump (spike) into the red. When I load sonar using the asio etc... the latences become more stable. Only complaint is that somtimes the motu 8pre and laptop loose connection but is rare.

Questions:
1) Should I give these 3rd party drivers a go and see if I gain more stability/improvement in the overall operation?

2) Seeing as how the controller on my laptop is not TI, would it benifit me to try an express card, or would my laptop controller overide the TI chipset on an express card?

3) Are there interface hubs that convert firewire to usb2 and would that make any sense because I know that as far as laptops are concerned, the firewire ports are becomming less common.

4) I am thinking that the loss of communication between the motu 8pre and the laptop are due to the occasional spikes in the DCP latency. I do have alot disabled in device manager and no internet connection on, and disabled firewalls and antivirus. Any thoughts or empathy?

Thanks for this thread by the way, it is very intresting.

Ratona

[metalmike]

I have been fighting (with little input here) for my MOTU 828Mk II I got from my buddy (he wanted to get the Ultralite I think) and not being able to get CueMix to load on any driver from 3.6.x.1394 and beyond. I was running an older version and it worked. I figured newest driver may resolve the issue - NOPE. I kept hitting the device is on a bus of different speed (something along those lines) message.

So I uninstalled it, got rid of the mfw*.drv file in System32 and snagged that AVT FW driver, installed, rebooted, installed latest MOTU driver, rebooted, plugged in, turned on MOTU 828Mk II and finished the driver installation. All went fine at that point so I immediately tried the CueMix Console and VIOLA! It worked! I was VERY happy to finally be able to use a newer driver. I am still running the ASIO4All driver until I figure out the MOTU ASIO within Ableton Live (8.1.1) as there are different ins/outs on it and 11/12 didn't give me any audio output. I tweaked the sample rate down to 256 to get rid of latency/lag and looks good. I may try to bump it up to 512 and see if all is stable. Anyways, thanks for finding this free driver and love that it has an app to allow you to switch between the drivers = VERY VERY NICE to have in the installation of it.

Mike

[Drummer_CZ]

Hello friends. I have trouble with 828MKIII when play music from my iTunes library. Sometime, when I open Internet Explorer while music is playing some music interruption occur. I have no problems with Cubase 5 or other ASIO based applications - no pops, no interruptions - everything is OK.

I have TI based Firewire 400 PCI card under Windows 7 64bit with Firewire "Legacy" driver. I would like to try AVT drivers, but I don`t know what I`m doing wrong. After AVT driver is instaled and MOTU 828 connected - nothing happened. System can`t recognize my MOTU. When I rollback to Windows based driver - my MOTu is recognized prompltly.

I know that is very difficult find answer to my question, but maybe I lost some step .. I don`d know. Thank for Your help.

P.S. I`m sorry for my English - I`m not native speaker

[Aleen]

Hi, there,

I just wanted to share my experience with various drivers tries and basic tweaks among all you can read in various forums.
If you don't want to read all the boring details of this long post just jump to the end

First here is my setup
- MOTU UltraLite MK3
- Asus P5BE+ board with a TI onboard IEE1394 chipset
- Intel Core 2 duo 2.4Ghz
- 2GB RAM
- Windows 7 32bits (RC1)
- Using Ableton Live 8, ASIO buffer 128 samples at 44.1 sample rate

I was experiencing 2 sort of issues:
- Audio drops under windows after a nasty high beep, usually happened when for example browsing a web page with several videos on it, audio dropped and I has to reload the page. Or if I restarted my computer, the FW card was still recognized but did not output any sound.
- THE clicks, pops, crackles and whizz thing using ASIO, that get worse when I turn the ASIO buffer down, and that are not related to CPU spikes.

The first one was sorted out by the latest MOTU drivers (3.7.37320) out in January. They are way more stable (I also had BSOD from time to times with previous drivers, no more here). So I highly recommend the upgrade.

The second one led me to this forum (and tons of others
I had these crackles and clicks when using Ableton Live, when playing around with clips (creating new ones or duplicating them on the fly), no need to have a complex set, just 2 or 3 drum part a bass and a lead with some effects, all Ableton internal instruments, a constant 20-30% CPU usage with a 128 Samples buffer (which gives me about 10ms latency in Live)
I also use Sound Forge to simply process single audio files, and I have the crackles when scrolling through the waveform and an audible click when jumping to another part of the file while playing. I describe this because I read many "clicks and pops" topics around, and the actual issue(s) were different.
So let's say Issue 1 = Ableton Live, Issue 2 = Sound forge scroll, Issue 3 = Sound forge click

So here is what I tried :
- MOTU driver upgrade : improved things a bit (maybe it's mor the overall impression of stability)
- Using a PCI firewire card, instead of onboard: No change, the onboard is a TI one so is ok, the PCI card has an Agere/LSI chip, and works exactly as good (or as bad
- Trying the usual optimisations ("background service" performance mode, disabling the onboard devices, and windows services etc ...): No change, which is in a way a good thing because it would be scary if in 2010, a PC cannot handle the slight overload of this.
- Tried the AVT drivers : Obviously worse, more clicks and crackles, but after changing the PCI latency in drivers setting to a high value, it was just a bit worse (not sure, but for sure not better)
- Tried to use the OHCI host controller LEGACY driver
When you change the driver manually you have 3 choices (don't ever ask why , "OHCI host controller Texas Instrument", "OHCI host controller", and "OHCI host controller (Legacy)". The first one is the default one, AVT driver can switch back to windows driver and when it does it uses the second one (which was in my case equal (i.e. a bit worse, but not sure than default one , and the third one seems better, I have no more clicks in sound forge (Issue 3 solved) when jumping to an audio file part, I still have some crackles in Ableton, but noticeably less (Issue 1 improved), scrolling in Sound Forge still crackles a bit less but still (Issue 2 not solved)
- Tried disabling all visual effects in Win 7 (Aero etc...)
This fixed Sound Forge scrolling issue (Issue 2), but did not change anything in Ableton Live ... So disabling it might help, depending what app you're using. Disabling all makes you jump back to Windows 95 era in terms of user experience, if you're having a dedicated DAW PC you don't care, but for a an all purpose machine it's really annoying ...

So to sum it up :
- Upgrade to 3.7.37320 drivers really helps on windows audio and improves crackling and poping a bit
- Use OHCI host controller LEGACY driver improves crackling and popping (but does not fully get rid of it)
- Disabling visual effect can improves things in some apps but not all, so you have to try.
- Third party drivers (AVT) did not improve anything in my case.

Looks like the only definitive solution is "Get a Mac", but at least if this post can help some to get things a bit better without blowing up your windows installation with complicated tweaks (All these were for me quick and easy to try, and easily reversible)

Have a nice day (or night)

Aleen

[Ratona]

Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop
Windows Vista Home Preium
Intel(R)Core(TM)2CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
Memory: RAM 2.00GB
System: 32 Bit
Recording w/Sonar 8 Producer Edition
Sound Card: Motu 8-pre
Yamaha S90ES Keyboard


I bought a Bekin Express Card disable stuff in my Device Manager.

The Following are disabled when recording:
*Battery:Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery
*Display Driver:NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300
*DVD Drive
*IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers (only the following)
-Ricoh Memory Stick Host Controller
-Ricoh MMC Host Controller
-Ricoh xD-Picture Card Controller
*IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers (only the following
-RICOH OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
*Imaging Devices
-Brother MFC-7820N LAN (my printer)
*Modems
-Conexant HDA D110 MDC V.92 Modem
*Networking:
-Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
-Broadcom 802.11g Network Adapter
***NOTE This doesn't take but a couple of minutes and a reboot, but before reboot, I also do 2 other things. Here they are.

1. Under the "Start Menu" in the search pane I type in the following "msconfig"
2. I am then prompted by a pop-up window -the user account control and it requestes my permission to continue. I select "continue"
3. I then see the System Configuration Panel. There are 5 tabs at the top. I select the "Services tab"
4. VERY IMPORTANT, at the bottom left corner of the screen you will see a box you can check that says "Hide All Microsoft services" . I check the box.
5. Then I select the "Disable all" tab at the right side above the help tab.
6. Then I select the Apply tab to the left of the help tab.
7. Then again to the top where the 5 tabs are I select the Startup tab.
8. On that screen I simply select Disable all at the lower right above the help tab.
9. Again select apply
11. On the General Tab (again found at the top-one of the 5 main tabs) I select it.
12. Here I have 3 options for startup selection. I see the following choices: Normal startup, Diagonostic startup and Selective startup. The one that is selected is the 3rd on and the associated boxes under that have "Load system services" checked. "Load startup items" is NOT checked and Use orginal boot configuration is Greyed out.
13. If you make any changes here then select apply, otherwise just close by selecting the X at the upper right coner of the box.

14. If you get a window that asks you to reboot, select "exit without rebooting or restarting"

Lastly, I go to the bottom right of my main windows screen and place my pointer over the norton icon in task manager. I disable "norton anti virus" and "smart firewall"

OKAY, then I reboot.

I have been recording just fine. No pops/clicks or dropouts.
I have not done any live recording yet.
Initally I took one of my old songs that had 4 MIDI tracks done and cloned them to the point of having 32 tracks. Not a problem.

The DPC Checker I ran shows all in the green and no red.

It has now been several weeks and without problem.

Again to set this up only takes about 5 minutes.

Don't know if this will help you out, but it did me.

Chao!

[Advoc]

I've been trying the IRQ approach. And I haven't had any luck so far.

I've noticed that my Firewire IRQ is shared with about 4 other things.
So I changed my bios to allow windows to assign IRQ's for PnP devices, and none of the irq settings changed. So I tried to do what this fellow from this thread:

http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtop ... 58#1060858" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Told me to do and I've hit the snag were I can't unclick the box in device manager that says "Use automatic settings" which means I can't change the IRQ settings manually...

I figure maybe this will be a good fix as opposed to trying out 3rd party drivers...

IF the fix can even be done....

[llamaza]

Just bought Dell Studio 1557

Win 7 64 bits Profesional + Motu Ultralite (not MKIII)
Firstly, try to install last drivers realeased by Motu V 3.7.37320
This is my second Dell laptop so I do not expect a relax experience installing my "lovely" Ultralite, but it was right, everything works fine, till I go to bed.
Next morning, open the DAW....... An incredible ¡¡awful!! noise in every Motu Output (Main-Phones-Analog 1-8) So I thought to the better would be to kick the interface through the window of my bedroom. I began to remerber the oddisey until I find this post, replacing the win firewire driver to the AVT firewire one.
So I tried to make the same thing,but there is not a driver for 64bits win 7.
Disable some hardware in device manager. No luck.

Till I discover another motunation post talking about the win 7 legacy firewire driver.
My solution:
1. Unistall drivers
2. Restart computer
3. Install win legacy firewire driver (Google it)
4. Install Motu drivers 3.6.8.1394 following the installer instructions
and that´s all.
I´m working two or three hours a day since last friday.
DPC Latency checker is always in the green part. I have tested the system to its limits.
Web camera, PCI realtek internet port, card reader are disable in the device manager.

Some minor crackles (DPC Latency does not show any red line) when I change the buffer size to 128. I think it is the old problem with the firewire bandwidth setting. I bet that is set to 100 instead of 400, because of the legacy driver. But now I am working very well and I am proud of the system config I have reached.
If someone knows how to check the win 7 registry to find the settings of the firewire port, it would be great.I have tried the win xp regedit solution but I am not able to find the correct string. Things have changed a little bit from win xp to win 7.
The other "little" problem is the change of the buffer size within Ableton causes a crash the program almost everytime. But, again, I can live with the buffer settings permanently at 256 or 512 because I am working in vst basis.

Good luck for everybody out there, and thank you very much for your help and effort, especially to TheRealRoach.

Greetings from Spain.

[cragto]

I receive a "link appears to be broken" message when trying to use the AVT link for the bus driver posted on the first page. My OS is Win 7 64 bit, so I downloaded AVT FirePackage 64 and installed it. FirePackage64 v1.1 downloads from the right column of this page:

http://www.alliedvisiontec.com/us/produ ... ckage.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

However, the system cannot find my Ultralite or its drivers, regardless of whether I use the procedure listed on the first page of this thread. Also, the Windows drivers do not remain, and I had to uninstall AVT to get back to Windows drivers. It did not appear that additional steps beyond installation are required for the 64 bit driver to work. Are additional steps required? How can I use the AVT driver?

[drhardlove]

I have cleared out a lot of the problems that was presented here. The crackling and sudden screeches, as well as a tendency to hang, is all gone. It's running smooth.
What did I do? I did the Microsoft fix for the reduced bandwidth on the firewire protocol in SP2 and SP3. In addition I followed the recommendations on RME's homepage, regarding the same problem.

The only problem left now, has arrived with Motu's newest driver, it seems to me, but it might have been a lesser problem before as well.

The issue is that every time I restart my computer, my two daisy chained 828 mk2's, change identity. There is also a tendency to a lot of confusion on the clock source chosen. I have a Micro Clock from BLA feeding both Motu's. In the displays I can typically see that the clock source can go back and forth several times, showing ext. 44/48 in, jump to Word Clock In, then to 828mk2 #1 etc. Occasionally it takes several minutes before it settles down on something, and that might be the opposite of what was the configuration by the last session.

I sometimes turn of the device that I want to be number two in the daisy chain, and everything is hunky dory. The single card rapidly hooks up well and runs smooth. Turning back on device number two, tends to lead to three different scenarios.

1. It registers as number two. Signified by the fact that Clock Source in display shows 828mk2 #1. Everything is well.

2. It starts to make strange behaviour in the Clock Source displays on both devices. Showing Ext 44.1/48 internal and word clock in. All in a randomly cycling process. It' just look damn confused to me. I can not access the MOTU audio console whilst this is happening, or I might get to access it, but its hanging and generally showing great signs of discomfort. Actually this leads sometimes to a situation where the cards actually stabilizes and keeps working.
If not it will lead to the last scenario that tends to be a reoccurring outcome to this problem...

3. The BSO Black screen of death, as they call it in the many web based forums.

The message is 1394bus.sys related. But don't give me the story that it's Microsoft alone. There must be some problem in the driver in conjunction with the 1394 protocol, and maybe related to the external clock issue, together with the fact that we are working with two identical devices. Can it be that the driver is trying to initiate the internal clocks, even though they are both set to external in?

On previous driver releases there wouldn't be a light piping of the external clock from one device to another, but it would take the clock individually.

Does anybody have any idea or experience with this kind of matter?

[pmd]

Hi,

Sure, this post is very usefull and give some hope to continue making audio with windows os!

So I red all 5 pages with big interest, also posts on Cakewalk forum "3rd party firewire drivers MOTU MULTIPLE UNIT USERS take note!" (http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?&m=1679286&mpage=1)

I can work on my config, it's quite ok, but not under buffer 512, and for live, it will be better to be lower. The day I test 2 motu 828 mkII chained, it was horrible, leds lightened everywhere, pops ...

- So I uninstalled motu driver and come back to v3.6.7.4 (witch seems to be the best version for win XP 32bits).
- I installed this: "AVT Universal Package_1v0"
(http://www.alliedvisiontec.com/emea/pro ... ckage.html)
because "AVT 1394 BusDriverPackage" do not work on my system ?

I can effectively now switch between 1394 default windows driver and AVT 1394 driver, ok.
The problem is that my motu 828 mkII is not recognized when AVT 1394 driver is actived ? Guys on all posts told that you have to buy a PCi card with Ti chipset, ok, but is there any possibility to make it work with an integrated firewire ?

Here some infos with SiW freeware about firewire chipset on my system:

01/06/00 PCI 1394 Texas Instruments (TI) TSB43AB22 1394a-2000 OHCI PHY/Link-Layer Controller Pinnacle Systems Inc
01/06/02 PCI USB VIA Technologies Inc VT6202/12 USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller
01/06/03 PCI 1394 VIA Technologies Inc VT6306 VIA Fire II IEEE-1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller
02/00/00 PCI-X OHCI FireWire JMicron Technology Corp
02/08/00 PCI SCSIAdapter Tekram Technology TRM-S1040 DC-315U Ultra SCSI Controller Tekram Technology
02/12/00 PCI 1394 VIA Technologies Inc VT6306 VIA Fire II IEEE-1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller


PCI Latency tool:



"TheRealRoach" on 2009 Tue Feb 24
(http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... 14&t=34558) gave some infos & possibility to edit Motu_fw.inf file, but I do not have seen more about it?

I just figured out the problem! Turns out it was a driver issue. If you open the Motu_fw.inf file (located in the folder C:\Program Files\MOTU\Audio\MOTUDriver), you can see all the devices listed in the group called [DeviceList.ntx86]:

[DeviceList.ntx86]
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&1 ; 828
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&2 ; 896
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&3 ; 828mk2
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&5 ; 896HD
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&9 ; TRaveler
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&A ; traveler updater
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&D ; ultralite
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&E ; ultralite updater
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&F ; 8pre
%AUDIO828%=DriverInstall828,1394\1f2&10 ; 8pre updater

The bits at the end of each line ("1394\1f2&3", etc) is the Firewire device ID which Windows uses to find the proper driver in the MOTU .inf files. However, my SIIG card was using the UniBrain Firewire drivers, wich gave the ID of the MOTU unit as "UB1394\1f2&3", so Windows could not match the Firewire device with anything in MOTU's list.

So, I uninstalled the UniBrain drivers and let Windows use its own drivers which give the correct ID for the MOTU unit, and the 828mkII is back in business!

Thanks for your time, all

____________________________________________________
Motherboard Asus M3A78-EM (with integrated firewire)
Motu 828 mkII fw
windows XP sp3 32bits RAM 2 Go
2 SSD & 1 SATA HDD

[TheRealRoach]

Hi pmd,

I wouldn't pursue the *.inf file modification unless. Probably a waste of time. Last year I gave it a great deal of work and never resolved the the issue of the driver failing to recognize the MOTU hardware when using the 3rd party AVT firewire bus controller.

Best of luck.

[pmd]

Hi Mike and thanks for reply !

Ok, Anyway I bought a Ti chipset Firewire PCI Card controller, so I will test as it's described, with AVT drivers ...

Best regards