MOTUnation.com

High this is Aaron Carey, on behalf of Cockos Incorporated.

I am trying to sort some problems out for our REAPER users but it should be of help for the users of any Windows DAW running MOTU hardware.

Changing nothing but the drivers from 3.6.7 to 3.6.8 I see this in the reported latency:

3.6.7





3.6.8




Now, before making any conclusions, I decided I better try the CEntrance Latency Test Utility, in case this was just reported latency and actual latency had not changed.

For some reason trying to run LTU on the 3.6.8 drivers results in an error loop. Thinking this was just the 8pre on one of my test systems I switched to another computer running an 896

Running the 3.6.8 drivers onto the 896, I was no longer able to select the adat I/O! At this point I called tech support. The said they never heard of either issue, and that there was noone above I could speak to.

In order to solicit more help, I posted this forum link: http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19905

Jim Roseberry and some of the ADK guys frequent that forum, so a lot of times these are issues they have dealt with before. A REAPER user found a way to rename one of the motu files and get the LTU to run in 3.6.8 with these results

(3.6.8 dropped the 32 sample size so I'll start from 64)

Centrance LTU tests for 3.6.7.4:

64 samples buffer size:
Measurement results: 234 samples / 5.31 ms

128 samples:
Measurement results: 362 samples / 8.21 ms

256 samples:
Measurement results: 618 samples / 14.01 ms


Centrance LTU results for driver 3.6.8

64 samples
Measurement results: 362 samples / 8.21 ms

128 samples
Measurement results: 618 samples / 14.01 ms

256 samples
Measurement results: 1130 samples / 25.62 ms

Obviously, this isnt just a reported latency difference, its actual

For the tech support staff to NOT know latency had doubled? Please....

I then started a techlink to deal with this

MTL 19128 ••” 3.6.8.1 drivers functioning in an odd way

https://www.motu.com/techsupport/tracke ... e_id=19128

Thinking that I would reccomend to our users to run the earlier drivers, I was shocked to see that they were not available on MOTU's website! I pointed this out to MOTU tech support but as of yet have not seen a repost, but it gets worse:

You cannot just uninstall the new drivers and reinstall the old ones. If you do you get an error: "the driver is too old for your MOTU hardware"

Calling MOTU tech support yet again, I was told by the staff to "delete motu entries from the registry" then reinstall

For one thing, there is NO WAY I'm telling potentially computer un-savvy clients or even knowledgeable ones to go trolloping through the registry.

For another thing, since I have a backup image and was able to try it, that doesn't even work. Same error.

A helpful user at the cockos forum showed a way to get back the old drivers and it seems to be working, but there is NO WAY I'm going to reccomend a risky procedure to customers just to get around MOTU not making an uninstaller that actually works.

Now, this was more than a week ago, which is an eternity in REAPER time, but maybe par for the course in the new MOTU (as compared to the motu of last year who really had seemed to shake off the poor tech support they had back in the day)

If I call I mostly get a busy signal or I get another tech who says they have never heard of these issues.

I have an EXTREMELY hard time believing that anyone calling themselves "tech support" wouldn't know that the new drivers DOUBLE the round trip latency!

If anyone knows a direct line or email to a higher up, or can forward this on to someone at MOTU that has a clue, please let me know.

The 8pre is a SCREAMING value right now, and I want to reccomend it as highly as it deserves, but at the moment I simply cannot due to these driver issues.

Please help

Thanks for that post - I had just started to notice that my latency had increased a little (I use 128 buffer) and thanks to the links you provided I was able to get back to the previous drivers without issues.
Cheers again.
Hope MOTU chime in & let us know why they did that ? The new drivers seemed fine here otherwise !!

I can't say I've noticed any difference so I'll stick with the new ones.

Pipeline is right--I see the same thing.

DRIVERS 3.6.7

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/downl ... SB-Driver/#

Thank you so very much! Hopefully that link stays up long enough for anyone to grab it.

Jim Roseberry posted a procedure for getting rid of the "your software is too old for your motu hardware" error message:

1. Use Add/Remove Programs to uninstall the drivers
2. Manually delete "mfwaasio.drv" from Windows\system32
3. Install the old drivers

Still crickets on the techlink

Just to make sure I'm understanding all these threads here...as an 828 Mk III user, I will get much better results if I use the older 3.6.7.4 driver rather than the 3.6.8 driver that's installed now? Including like half the latency per samplerate? And the ability to drop down below 64 samples?

I haven't seen the 828 mk. III specifically in any of these threads, but as far as I know, it uses the same drivers as everything else firewire, yes? I ask because as plagued as I've been in Vista x64 environment, things are working perfectly in XP x86 and I don't want to screw up what is working fine (of course, I could just try the driver rollback in Vista and leave XP as is for the time being...).

I put a tech link in before Memorial Day weekend. When they hadn't gotten back to me by that Tuesday, I wrote it off as a long weekend thing. A couple weeks later, I am starting to assume that they don't read techlink submissions. It is still marked unread despite their "suggested" turnaround time of around 48 hours...

Interesting...I just got a response to my techlink. It details a process for uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling the drivers. What's interesting to me is that they did not recommend upgrading to the 1.05 firmware. Guess I won't!

pipelineaudio wrote:I have an EXTREMELY hard time believing that anyone calling themselves "tech support" wouldn't know that the new drivers DOUBLE the round trip latency!

I have an EXTREMELY hard time believing that 362 is the DOUBLE of 234 ;)

pardon, my math, but 15-24 msec is close enough

pipelineaudio wrote:
Jim Roseberry posted a procedure for getting rid of the "your software is too old for your motu hardware" error message:

1. Use Add/Remove Programs to uninstall the drivers
2. Manually delete "mfwaasio.drv" from Windows\system32
3. Install the old drivers

Thanks for posting that Aaron, I'd been getting latency problems in Cubase SL3 after installing the new drivers for my 8Pre; not only did latency increase but appeared to be reported wrongly to Cubase, as I had to manually adjust the latency compensation. Rolling back the drivers just gave error messages and left the 8Pre unusable. This seems to have fixed the problem.

Cheers,
Ben

Guys - anyone now the way to go with X64 (Vista) and new 828mkIII - seems like the only available driver is 3.6.8 that shipped with the unit. It looks like there is no older driver for this model.

The latency in Vista running on Sonar is aweful - and yes, i've stripped everything out of Vista and have it running at a very acceptable level. I believe it's the Motu drivers causing the latency issue.

And after reading this forum i'm even more convinced!!

Cheers,

Ben

Bump.

828MkII is only able to play back, not record. 'Tis going to make recording the album tomorrow night a bit of a challenge.

C'mon MOTU - we're dying out here.

So several weeks ago, I posted to this board and had asked for assistance in getting our studio's MOTU Ultralite and Vista 32-bit machine to work properly. Because our studio depends solely on MOTU, we also logged a support ticket with MOTU Support, referencing all the details, versioning #s, and a background/history of identified problems.

It's been several weeks, like I said. And the only reply I received from MOTU Support was last week. It was one sentence that asked me what firmware version I used.

WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP. All that information was submitted in our original problem ticket#. But I replied to them and gave them the info. I said again that it's pretty urgent since we are at a standstill due to these Ultralite/Vista problems. I've waited weeks, and we've still heard nothing.

At this point, it's safe to say that we are no longer going to recommend MOTU's products to others in the industry. They're sheer lack of support, and total disregard (and lack of respect) to their customers is APPAULING.

I'm not certain whether MOTU reps actually read this site. But if they do, ladies and gentlemen, you should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves.

We've been faithfully using the Ultralite under XP for years, and it's worked flawlessly. I expected the same under Vista - considering MOTU has released "valid" drivers. Those drivers suck. Not only under Vista, but under XP as well. Completely useless. And to not offer legacy drivers from the official MOTU site? C'mon. It's ridiculous that we need to search every corner of the Internet in order to find legacy drivers.

Obviously, as we now see, the latest March 2008 drivers are USELESS.

I literally spent days experimenting with Vista settings and MOTU drivers, then XP settings and MOTU drivers. It's taken a signficiant amount of time and effort, but I've finally managed to get everything completely functional under Vista 32-bit. Ultralite latency under Vista is 5.3ms, finally.

By no means is MOTU off the hook.
We are still unable to get the Ultralite to register above 48000, and still suffer from occassional dropouts (although that's rare). Ridiculous.

I think it's a damn shame that MOTU treats their customers so poorly.
We are looking closely at their competitors now. And this Ultralite will unfortunately be decommissioned shortly.

Hope everyone has had better success with MOTU Support.
Regards,


"SOON TO BE EX-" MOTU USER