MOTUnation.com

Hi for everyone here!

Lately I become the owner of a Microbook II. I use it on a Lenovo X230 i7 notebook with 16 GB Ram, under Win7 Pro. It works like a charm as default system sound source or in Sonar with plenty of MIDI and audio tracks.... BUT:

In Soundforge 8.0 (and in the trial version of 10.0 also) there's a constant lag on pressing the start/stop button. This means that on start Soundforge needs about half a second to play actually and on stop half a second again for the program become responsive again. During editing there are moments when the program becomes unresponsive for 4-5 seconds especially when I select very small amount of data and zoom it. The worst is that there are cases when the program completely freezes with the rotating circle mouse pointer. In this cases I have to disconnect the usb cable to be able to exit Sound Forge, reconnect, rerun the program. This is the best scenario using the Asio4all driver. Using any other driver or the soundmapper Sound Forge freezes in five minutes surely the way I wrote above. Soundforge itself works absolutely right with the onboard soundcard using any driver choosen....

I tried reconfigure almost anything with no luck. I can live with that situation using the Asio4all driver but it would be so nice to get a rocksolide solution for my projects....

So if there's someone who's got any idea what's going on here, please, let me know!!

Thank you!

I've experienced that briefly in the past. Not sure what I did to fix it because it wasn't too difficult.

One of the first things I do whenever I install SF on a new machine, is make sure that when you have the File | Open box opened, uncheck the selection for "Autoplay". Turn that off there. It helps I think overall.

And here. You should use the MOTU Audio driver as in the pic below:



Let me know if you need more ideas.

Thanks a lot for your help!!

I turned the "autoplay" off and it become better. The start/stop lag remained but now I'm able to use the Microbook asio driver. Previously it freezed the program after several seconds of playing.

I need some deeper test but until now there was only 1 bigger lag (4-5 seconds long) in a half an hour long working session, which is good!!

Anyway.. my asio driver looks differerent in soundforge than the one on your picture included . The name is "MOTU Microbook Asio" and instead of "Analog 1, ..2, etc." it shows the real names of the outputs (Main, Line, Phones, Aux..). What can be the difference? My CueMixFX Devices/Setup page shows me that my driver is 4.0 55333. Is there maybe another version working better in Sounforge?? It seemed to me to be the freshest as I downloded it from the Microbook II support/download site.

I'll report my later experiences! Thank you again!

So... the (hopefully) final result:

As I turned the "auto play" in the Open dialogbox off, the program freeze - which could only be solved by disconnecting the Microbook - gone using any of the available drivers. This statement is valid still after about 20 hours of work.

But the half a second lag on pressing start/stop and the 4-5 seconds lag while editing (especially using long files and on deleting small parts of the recorded material, but not only in this cases...)remained.

I started to experiment with other settings and tweaks but nothing resulted real change. At the end I turned the windows superfetch feature off. This way 90% of the 4-5 second lags gone but the start/stop lag was still there.

At that point I switched back to the Asio4all driver which was more stable all the time. This way another 90% of the remaining 4-5 second lags gone. This means that such a lag occurs about 1 or 2 times in a one hour long intensive working session and the length of this stops got shortened (2-3 seconds instead of 4-5). I think the start/stop lags got shortened as well but this is not an issue really anyway.

After all... some Microbook dis/reconnect, several reboots, etc. and still the same situation. The overall responsiveness of the program is much better now as well!

Thanks for all of your advices!!:)

Update all of your drivers to latest for everything, even if you think it's unrelated. This will in turn lower the dpc latency and may fix it completely for you.

Especially networking.

If you have a wireless card based on the Atheros chipset, update that from here instead:

http://atheros.cz