problem with presonus firebox

[julien_]

Hello everyone,
here is my first post, i'm really interesting by usine software
i try to run usine on bootcamp with a presonus firebox but I got big problems.The card makes a lot of noise.
It works well with the built in sound card
Did someone got a similar problem ?
thx

[antwan]

hi there julien,

welcome to the usine forum.
there's some rather likely causes but let's start with these simple questions:

can you confirm whether you have these noise problems also with other music software?
how would you describe the noise?

also, which windows version are you running? have you optimized windows for pro audio work?

i have a santa rosa macbook pro, bootcamp running XP and a motu ultralite (firewire) - had MAJOR problems, took me a week to sort it out, but nowadays works like a charm.
so don't worry, there's always a way out

antwan

[nay-seven]

don't know about bootcamp capacity , but i suppose you have to be more precise to have answers...
did bootcamp support asio driver ? ,have you tried different buffer size? , did your presonus work with an other software under bootcamp..?

you can also check here :
http://forums.presonus.com/search.php?searchid=112459

hope this help...

[senso]

Normally Usine works perfectly with bootcamp. I use it at home and i know at least 30 persons who's also use Usine that way.

By experience I know some troubles with the Wlan (wifi) adapter of the mac.
You can try to disable it in the device manager.
I hope It will help.

[antwan]

yes,

I doubt it has anything specifically to do with Usine. Naturally, we will need to know more to be sure.
It's most likely a firewire controller / hotfix problem, serious device conflicts, interference of wlan or bluetooth and/or graphics card... most likely latency spikes in general. Or just lack of optimization. But it depends on the details.

we will see.

antwan

[julien_]

thx for your quick answer
I use usine on a new imac 24", bootcamp and xp pro sp2
I made test with presonus drivers and asio4all drivers.
I installed http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 for fireware update.
The problem is still the same, difficult to describe: i recognized sound playing but with a lot of noise "behind", like a mix of gate and bitcrusher.
No test on other software for the moment.
i saw this post on presonus forum(thx for the links) , gonna test these settings and disable wifi too
http://forums.presonus.com/showthread.p ... t=bootcamp
hope it will solve the problem

[antwan]

hi,

since i don't know anything much about the firebox - although my band mate runs one with a macbook and the older bootcamp - apparently quite succesully - i can't really say if that might be caused by something in the firebox settings. But assuming it's something else, here's a copy/paste of what I wrote to the motu-forum about what i did to get mine working:

Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:02 am Post subject: Road to success: Ultralite + MacBookPro + Bootcamp + XP

Hi,

I think I'm now safe to post this success story (knock on wood).
I was absolutely dumbstruck when I first installed and hooked up the newly bought Motu Ultralite to my newly bought MacBook Pro running Bootcamp. I'm one of the lucky ones who at first got nothing but digital noise waste when I first activated my ASIO engine. Never have I had exactly *such* an awful first impression on a sound card, even in Windows. But since the hardware is full of beautiful things I decided to go forth and try and fix it.
It's been a 1,5 week process but I now believe I have a fully working setup.

I know - for many of you this is nothing new - and a lot of this has been discussed all over this forum. But here is how I got mine working.

First the specs:

I have a Santa Rosa chipset MacBook Pro 15". That's Intel Dual Core T7500 @ 2.2 Ghz. 2Gb RAM. Texas Instruments Firewire Controller. NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT display adapter. Atheros AR5008 WLAN adapter. Marvell Yukon 88E8058 ethernet adapter.

All this running Bootcamp and Windows XP SP2.

Steps I took:

- First carry out and be familiar with traditional XP optimization for pro audio work. Check out for example: www.musicxp.com for tuning tips.

- A good, free tool to monitor DPC latencies and therefore your systems current capabilities for real-time audio - and the effects that different steps taken have - is called DPC Latency Checker. You can get it here:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

- Install the Ultralite firmware and drivers as instructed. Note that I'm currently running 1.10 firmware and 3.6.7.3 drivers. I am no longer sure if downgrading was absolutely essential but at the time it did show improvement. Later steps taken might have rendered the downgrading step unnecessary.

- In the Device Manager, under network adapters:
Disable 1394 networking (important)
Bluetooth-devices (not sure if crucial, although likely so)
and
the WLAN adapter (in my case Atheros AR5008 - very important). Note that in my case disabling the WLAN adapter caused a full system lockup. This is discussed here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... ID=6410929

For me and many others, XP hotfix 893357 (WPA2 fix) fixes this problem and i was able to disable the WLAN adapter without total system freeze.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893357

If it doesn't work it's at least important to turn OFF the Radio of the WLAN adapter [Device Manager > WLAN Adaper > Properties > Advanced TAB > Radio On/Off > OFF]

- Next install three XP hotfixes, in this order, restarting after each install.
904412 (Firewire fix)
896256 (Multi processor fix)
885222 (Firewire fix)

- I did try installing newer/different drivers for the display adapter, the network and wlan adapters and internal sound device drivers. I don't think any of this is necessary at the end of the day. Most likely though if something did have improving effect, it would have been the display adapter drivers but initially SKIP this and carry out the next step...

- Right-click the desktop to get to the Display preferences. In the Settings-tab, click the Advanced button. Go to the Troubleshoot tab. Drag the Hardware Acceleration slider to NONE. This will namely disable NVidia's own control panel and it's settings.

- Finally, and this had a final MAJOR improvement. I disabled ALL STARTUP ITEMS in msconfig.
Go to the Start Menu, select Run. Type "msconfig" without the quotes and hit enter. Go to the Startup tab. UNCHECK every item. Restart.
Most likely what was causing trouble there was either NVIDIA, Bluetooth or Bootcamp related. I'm not sure but I will not go back to check, sorry Smile

These were the steps that I believe finally took my Ultralite from a useless noise box into a perfectly working firewire interface. So far I have tested with 128 Buffer size, 4 active inputs and 6 active outputs.

Finally:
I know Windows has always been and utterly tricky OS for pro audio but Motu's windows drivers must still be the worst i've seen to date. I see all these people battling with these same issues, many of which end up selling away the device. Which is a shame for Motu, because the hardware is great. It's only the Windows drivers which can easily be called crap. I really really think they should do something about it - rather than close their eyes about it. At the moment it would only be fair that they put up a huge banner on their website saying: YOU MIGHT HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTIES GETTING THIS TO WORK ON WINDOWS ALTHOUGH WE SAY IT SUPPORTED.

The DPC latency tool was really useful for monitoring different stages of fixing my problems. I should add that I don't have any experience whether SP3 does good or bad things for pro audio. Anyways, let us know.

Cheers,

antwan

[julien_]

thx again for the answer.
i solve my problem defining cpu parameter in "hi" in the sound card panel device
and disable wifi
let's start music