MOTU 2408 settings...

S

schwa

New member
Hi Folks,

I am hoping for some help from any other users of the MOTU 2408 out there. I just picked this card up and installed it on my Dell 1.4 GHz P4 (yeah I know, bad choice). I'm running WinME and WDM drivers with SONAR.

The thing is, while I can configure the card for sub 10ms latency in SONAR, cuemix gets upset and falls behind, asking for a larger buffer. Sometimes I get dropouts, but they're not too bad at this point.

Is this typical? What are you other users setting your buffers to? The card seems to be capable of blistering performance, but as is often the case, they're not making it easy.
 
I would imagine that Sonar is capable of better speeds with the WDM drivers than whatever it is you mentioned. I hear a decent clock really cleans up the converters in the 2408. I've been looking at the 1224 and the 1296. The 1296 is supposed to be really nice, with great sounding converters, in the Apogee range. The 2408 is referedd to as a "swiss army knife" because of its routing capabilities, but the converters are kinda crappy.
 
How many I,Os are you enabling in the 2408 and which ones?
I,m not running the WDM drivers yet ,but I dont understand why you are using the Cuemix console.....
 
Building a system...

Well, I was aware that the 2408's converters are not regarded as the best, but so far they seem competent (for a home reccer). I bought the 2408 for its digital connections in addtion to the analog I/O.

1. It gave me WDM to use with SONAR.
2. It gave me addtional anaolg I/O (I have an Aark Direct Pro previously).
3. It gave me a boatload of digital I/O, I have my eye on the Tascam DM-24 and hope it will work as a control surface.
4. (less so, but a consderation) the PCI-24 interface allows the addtion of the "better" I/O units in the future. I think I saw the 24i on clearance at mars last week.

I expect I'll be adding a clock along with the DM-24.

I am using all 8 ins and just two outs (to a pair of PS-6's). Currently I have the other outs active, but may disable them shortly.

I may be using the cuemix in error, its my understanding that its necessary in order to monitor signals being recorded at the same time as previously recorded tracks. The cue mix also give some idea as to how "happy" the interface is in terms of throughput, listing suggested buffer sizes and latency values. This feedback is the main reason I am asking the question at hand.

I am still learning my way through this piece of gear (it never seems to end), but was hoping to benefit from someone's real world experience.
 
Im not real sure about the cuemix, but I have the same system, i have Sonar but not running the WDM,s yet I will try it myself and see if I can reduce latency that way..

As far as the converters go, they are quite adequate, have good circuitry around them and you will be able to do anything you could want to do up and including the adding 1296 later if you want.. :)

The system is rock solid..Keith Turner is up and running and may chime in on this issue..hes sorta my advance scout on this system.. Enjoy!
 
try opening the pci console first,before launching sonar then lower the buffer settings . in my case i went down from 1024 to 64 then back up to 256 finally before i achieved a stable setting that would work on lower latency settings in sonar. launch sonar and run wave profiler, also check driver profiles and make sure 32bit left justified and dma settings match the buffers you set in the pci console.in my case dma was 256 512 256 512.this is automatically done for you when you run wave profiler just check it to make sure everything looks cool. good luck, let us know how you make out ; fyi, i can only get down to 5.8ms on win98se on a p3-800 but this is servicable for my occasional softsynth usage.
 
Thanks Keith,

Do you agree with there being no need to use cuemix for lowering latency? From what I understand from Motu, its better suited for submixing if you dont have mixing software, although it does mention lowering latency in the manual..

Also ,I notice that you are running Win 98SE with the WDM drivers, how about giving us a run down on what we need to do to load the drivers using Win 98SE.....

Also, how are you setting up the 2408 for input monitoring..

Also, have you tried recording with effects yet? I am looking forward to doing this, specificly the Antares Mic Modeler

All of this is in reference to use with Sonar or Cake 9 by the way..

Alot of also,s but I thank you for the help in advance!
 
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Good info Keith...

I also have been playing with the buffer settings, my system seems to be a little happier with a 512 buffer setting, and I have been re-profiling in SONAR. My DMA settings are 512, 512, 512, 512. I wonder if this is contributing to my problems. I am also getting SONAR crashes, that I did not have with my Aark card. I am going to attempt a Win2k install today and see where that gets me.

I did some experiments with cuemix yesterday, and while it does not seem to need to be running in order to record, it does seem to allow setting of the overall mix level independent of the application.
 
Day 3 (or is it 4?)

Ok guys, I loaded Win2k on my system. Here are some observations.

I have been wrestling with my machine to allow for good performance, and have been trying to get my Dell machine to allow me to allocate an IRQ to itself. With this in mind, I attempted to turn off ACPI in Win2k in setup, since I cannot in the BIOS. The proceedure described in the Cakewalk newsgroup suggested hitting F5 during the beginning of setup in order to specify Standard PC mode. This was not successful, I assume I am running ACPI.

Most of the day was spent getting the OS loaded, critical updates, SP2, SONAR, SONAR Patch, USB MIDI, and the MOTU drivers installed. 5 or 6 hours later I had things loaded under Win2k.

Then I went into sonar and did not experiments. Initially, the latency was terrible, and didn't seem to correspond with the latency indicated by the audio settings.

Since I'm a glutton for punishment, I actually decreased the buffer setting in the MOTU console to 128. Re-profiled, and started getting resonable (undetectable) latency. Now let's see if we can record anything.

My normal mode of working is to start with most parts laid out in MIDI, and to play along with the MIDI playback on my guitar or through a mic. This is where it get interesting.

To hear what you are playing, you need to have the input monitoring on (for the input you are using), and you need to have an audio track pointed to that input armed for recording. But wait, I can't hear my MIDI tracks!

Enter the cuemix. I needed to turn on cuemix in order to get the synth to playback while I recorded my guitar track. Cuemix was still complaining that it would like a bigger buffer size, though not to the extent I saw in WinMe.

About this time I had had enough. I decided to go back to it tomorow morning, at which time I'll try to do some more substantive work.

So, at least under Win2k it seems that I need to either:

Record all of my MIDI tracks to audio before tracking "live" sources like guitar or vocals.

Run cuemix with the synth inputs on in order to track "live" sources.

I haven't yet determined which is more efficient.

Well, there some stuff to chew on, as I stated before, I'd definitely be interested in any input other MOTU users would have.
 
i rarely use cuemix though i think it is a good tool to have for certain situations. the first time i loaded wdm drivers the system called for my win 98se disk,i don't know why but these were the beta 1 drivers.i didn't remove the pci card,just uninstalled the wave driver and install the betas . i recorded my 1st song on sonar using amp simulater to turn an organ program i was playing into a screamin guitar(like) solo live;there was some latency but it was doable,probably could get the latency out of it now.ditto input monitoring unusable latency then, probably ok now;just haven't played with it for a while.recently i added a lucid ad9624 ad converter to the system via the spdif ins on my motu 2408. this addition made me question the ablility of the 2408 to record spdif adat and analog inputs simultaneously in any combination.i can't get the spdif and analog inputs to show up in sonar at the same time ,if i enable any inputs but spdif in the pci console,spdif won't show up in sonar. example : check spdif input box 1+2 check analog input box 3+4 then only analog 3+4 are available in sonar;this with clock source set to spdif clock. same results for any combination of inputs. adat and analog inputs won't even work together. my only solution was to reinstall wave drivers yesterday; now i can use any input combination ,but have to sacrifice the power of the wdm drivers for now.anybody else run into this?
 
CueMix - Whats it good for!

I never used to use CueMix until a singer was complaining that he heard an "echo" in his headphones. I routed his mic channel through CueMix and voila, no more compaints.
 
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