MOTUnation.com

Wow... It's been ages since I posted over here. Hoping some MOTU hardware guru(s) can help me here. I searched here and at MOTU, but had no luck.

I just picked up a mint condition used MOTU 896 1st generation interface. It all seems to work just ducky unless I'm playing back a DP (or other DAW)
project from an external FW hard drive. The same project on an internal drive works fine so it's not the project. It's also not the drive as I've tried
3 different drives and they all show the same behavior. The 896 is plugged straight into one of the FW ports on my Mac and the drive(s) are in the
other FW port. I've tried using just one drive, swapping ports, 3 different FW cables, daisy chaining off the 896, incense, chanting and human sacrifice.

Am I to understand that the 896 (and maybe other MOTU FW interfaces) needs to be *alone* on the built in FW bus? Would installing a 3rd party FW
card in a PCI slot allow me to use my drives w/the 896 on the internal FW bus?

My Mac has FW 400 ports, not the faster FW 800 ports.

Thanks for any/all help!!

Hey bigdaddy:

Great to see you again!!

What machine do you have? The later model MacPros have a much larger fw buss than the older 33mhz busses which were on machines as late as my MacPro 3G Quad. I wouldn't put more than one device on a firewire port-- since ALL firewire ports fold into the same 33Mhz buss.

But I should also say that we have another member here who appears to have had a similar problem with a pair of 800-series MOTU boxes. He bought a FW host card and seems to have had success from what I recall. But whenever someone talks about pops and clicks, the first thing I look for is whether or not a firewire device is part of the setup. I'd say that 70% of the time this is the case.

PS: still no whining!!

Yo Frodo my good man - How have you been? Good to hear from you as well.

The Mac in question is a G4 dual 1.25 GHz with FW 800 ports (according to system profiler).

I'm getting the feeling that it's simply a bandwidth issue. As stated, when I playback from an internal drive (not the OS drive of course), it's perfectly fine. I recorded some drum tracks today using 6 of the 8 inputs and it was fine, again to the internal drive.

This is my first FW interface so I'm learning. I was trying to upgrade the studio and get away from the old M-Audio PCI hardware I've been using for ages. The system is somewhat cobbled together with 2 different M-Audio cards and while it works, it's not pretty. Figured the one FW interface would solve all my problems... DOH!!! There's never an easy fix, right?

So I'm thinking of buying a 3rd party PCI FW card and try running the drives from it, while leaving the 896 alone on the built-in FW bus (or vice versa). I don't care really, I just want to be able to record and playback from the gobs of external storage I have already invested in.

bigdaddy wrote:Yo Frodo my good man - How have you been? Good to hear from you as well.

Dude-- if I never got to thank you for all the help you gave me (sometimes without knowing it), let me do that now. I'm talking about maybe from as far back as 4-5 years ago.

THANKS!! Hobbits don't forget easily.

bigdaddy wrote: The Mac in question is a G4 dual 1.25 GHz with FW 800 ports (according to system profiler).

I'm getting the feeling that it's simply a bandwidth issue.

I'm sure you know that the FW800 ports fold into the same 33Mhz bus as the FW400 ports do.

bigdaddy wrote: As stated, when I playback from an internal drive (not the OS drive of course), it's perfectly fine. I recorded some drum tracks today using 6 of the 8 inputs and it was fine, again to the internal drive.

This is my first FW interface so I'm learning. I was trying to upgrade the studio and get away from the old M-Audio PCI hardware I've been using for ages. The system is somewhat cobbled together with 2 different M-Audio cards and while it works, it's not pretty. Figured the one FW interface would solve all my problems... DOH!!! There's never an easy fix, right?

So I'm thinking of buying a 3rd party PCI FW card and try running the drives from it, while leaving the 896 alone on the built-in FW bus (or vice versa). I don't care really, I just want to be able to record and playback from the gobs of external storage I have already invested in.

I think a an FW host card would serve you quite well on that machine-- although there's something you should know: the G4 1.25 Ghz had PCI slots which were no faster than the FW ports (33Mhz). That's the bad news, sort of. There's no telling if PCI @ 33Mhz would be much better than FW @ 33Mhz. However-- it would be another dedicated/independent buss, and that can make a world of difference if you have other fw devices to run.

The other thing is that straight-up PCI cards (no e or x) should be dirt cheap. There's one on Newegg.com for $12. The Sonnet cards are wonderfully reliable and super Mac-friendly. Their Allegro FW400 PCI card is in the $40-50 range.

I'm sure you did thank me many moons ago, and of course you are welcome. Knowledge is for sharing.

Just as you are doing now!!

I was a bit confused re: the FW ports on the Mac. It has just the 2 built-in ports and according to system profiler, they are 800. I had read earlier on the web that my Mac had FW 400 ports. I'm going to go with what the profiler says. Not that it matters that much as the 896 and all 3 ext. HD's are FW 400.

Yes, the ol' PCI cards are pretty cheap these days and I now have lots of PCI slots available, with all the M-Audio cards gone. Thanks for the tip on the NewEgg card. I never had a problem running audio off of the FW drives when using the PCI cards, so I'm hoping that another dedicated bus will straighten things out.

Off to shop for cards!!! Thanks for the help Frodo!

I'm not sure when Apple added FW800, but if there's any firewire on that G4 1.25 Dual, it's definitely 400.

And I'd recommend getting a card that will allow for as many parallel connections as possible (ie: machine to card rather than daisy chaining). Connecting in a chain works okay for light loads, but on busier projects performance can be improved if connections are made in parallel.

Good luck with the card! Actually, it sounds like a very affordable setup.

Thanks - Yes, it's a pretty solid setup so far. I just did the upgrade to DP 6.02 on my test partition and it's running smooth. Spent a few hours editing audio and such. Knock on wood - No probs so far.

Noticed one bug which doesn't effect stability. Maybe I'll post it in another thread.

I figure a 4 port card will be perfect - Leaves one port open after I attach my 3 drives.

Very encouraging news, BD.

Continued success and keep those reports coming in!

Well, it took me what... 2 months to get around to buying a card??? Anyhow, I did finally get tired of moving projects onto and off of my itsy bitsy internal drive. I wasn't impressed with the stuff New Egg had to offer so I went to my old standby company - OWC.

Card info - ADS Technologies PYRO FireWire 400 3-port PCI Card
Price - $32.99 plus shipping
Result... I can now run my 896 and external FW drives without the annoying issues mentioned above.

The card took all of 5 minutes to install, requires no 3rd party drivers and works flawlessly.

The 896 is plugged into the built-in FW port on the Mac (the other port is empty) and my 3 external drives are plugged into the card (one drive per port).

So I guess I can close the MOTU TechLink I opened up back in Feb. And no, they did not suggest this as a fix.